Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (48 page)

In fact Niv’s acting career was far from over for he was about to make three thirty-second TV commercials for Maxwell House coffee for a huge amount of money and then another film for Disney,
Candleshoe
. Nor did Sinclair-Stevenson’s reassurances mollify him when Hamish Hamilton were three weeks late in paying his latest paperback royalties – £70,000, more than £315,000 today – so that he lost more than £1300 (£6000 today) due to a sudden fall in the value of the Swiss franc against the pound. Even worse, their latest royalty payment for
The Moon’s a Balloon
failed to include the Coronet bonus. ‘I really don’t think we will want to do business with H. H. any more,’ Niv wrote angrily to Greenfield. ‘Remember that little effort of trying to extract a percentage of the purely voluntary adjustment of Coronet on “Moon”? – UGH!… We always thought Jamie was a “creep”, but I am deeply surprised at Roger and Christopher.’ Sinclair-Stevenson tried to settle the dispute by agreeing to make up the difference in the exchange rate, but Niv then wheeled on his Swiss lawyer, Dr Staehelin, to demand £849.98 more and to insist that Greenfield should repay commission that he had deducted from Niv’s BBC fee for reading
The Moon’s a Balloon
on radio because that was for a broadcast, not a book. Niv then told Greenfield that he should sack his foreign rights assistant, Vanessa Holt, because he did not believe she was trying hard enough to obtain the best deals for foreign translations of
Bring on the Empty Horses
. Greenfield defended her, agreeing that the foreign sales were disappointing but
pointing out that it was hardly her fault if ‘these damned Continentals’ did not understand or appreciate his sense of humour. A month later Niv was complaining again, this time because Putnam’s hardback edition of
The Moon’s a Balloon
seemed to be out of print in New York. Greenfield discovered that Putnam’s had pulped a large number of copies. ‘What fools! (or crooks),’ Niv fumed, and was not appeased when Putnam’s explained that US hardback sales had dwindled to just twenty a month now that the paperback was out. Then it was Coronet’s turn: their paperback edition of
Bring on the Empty Horses
was not nearly as stylish as the American one, he grumbled, and had an ‘incredible number of mistakes’. Once again he had been too lazy to read his own proofs. Despite his huge success he had become irritable, curmudgeonly, demanding and suspicious that everyone was either useless or trying to cheat him. Perhaps he had been spoiled as a film star by earning so much so easily for so long.

He was also becoming a control freak at home. ‘I went to see them in the South of France,’ said Fiona Thyssen, ‘and David took me sailing but was quite different in the boat, rather fierce, and instead of the usual charm I thought, “My God, he’s become a complete bloody admiral, very much Bossy Flossy.” ’ He was, however, about to be terrified himself when he saw the shark horror film
Jaws
and according to Peter Ustinov dived into his bottomless pool for a swim very early the next morning ‘and suddenly saw beneath him an enormous figure moving very slowly. Seized by panic, he leapt out of the pool and ran for safety until he realised that it was a man cleaning the pool in an exaggerated rubber uniform. He told me it gave him a terrible shock.’

In August he flew to England and travelled up to Warwickshire to make
Candleshoe
, in which fourteen-year-old Jodie Foster played a feisty, confident, streetwise kid from New York who is persuaded to pretend to be the long-lost, lookalike granddaughter and heir of an English aristocrat, the Marquis of Candleshoe. Niv played several parts – a blimpish
old colonel as well as the Candleshoe butler, Irish chauffeur, Scottish gardener and bosomy Cockney cook, Miss Oglethorpe – the surname that he had given to the Trubshawe character in
Round the Rugged Rocks
. It was a silly, unfunny movie but he was hugely impressed by Jodie Foster and told Roger Moore that she was ‘a most
extraordinarily
talented child who knew more than the director or cameraman!’ She told Niv sternly that she preferred to work with adults rather than children ‘as long as they remember their lines’.

He was fed up with one of his own children that autumn when Le Rosey suggested that Kristina, who was now fifteen, ought to leave the school. ‘She was always more interested in boys than her studies,’ said Fiona, so Niv sent her to an all-girls finishing school in Lausanne, the Institut Château Mont-Choisi, where ‘she attempted to do some O-levels and A-levels but didn’t do very well. She was never very academic.’ Even so, Kristina did pass her French O-level exam with an A grade the following summer.

By now
The Moon’s a Balloon
had sold 4½ million copies,
Bring on the Empty Horses
400,000 in hardback, the royalties were cascading in and Putnam’s were offering another fortune for any book he cared to write, but Niv still insisted that an Edinburgh author, Gordon Smith, should pay him a £5 copyright fee because he wanted to include one paragraph from
The Moon’s a Balloon
in a patriotic Scottish anthology that he was compiling,
This Is My Country
. Such ridiculous meanness was a startling contrast to his stunning generosity towards his family. ‘He was pretty close to the chest with a buck,’ said Betty Bacall but Jess Morgan denied that Niv’s insistence on being paid £5 was an example of his meanness. ‘That was just another Niven joke!’ he said. ‘ “Let’s make the bloke pay a bit, just for the fun of it!” ’

He finished
Candleshoe
at the end of October, flew back to Nice, complained to Greenfield that the bookshops at Heathrow airport had none of his books but plenty of Rex Harrison’s, and resumed his struggle to write
Make It Smaller
and Move It to the Left
. He was daunted by the fear of writing a disaster after two such huge successes and could be distracted for ten minutes by a 747 flying overhead or a bird on a tree. In desperation he wandered along Cap Ferrat to Somerset Maugham’s old villa to seek inspiration by sitting in the little summer house where Maugham had used to write, only to discover that it was now a lavatory for Algerian workers who were building new houses on Maugham’s estate.

In November he flew to New York by Concorde to promote the Dell paperback edition of
Bring on the Empty Horses
with TV appearances and interviews that helped to sell 1½ million copies in just two weeks. On the plane too was Bryan Forbes. ‘It was a hilarious trip because we both got legless on free drink,’ Forbes told me, ‘and I told him a story about Larry Olivier that he thought was the best he had ever heard and immediately wrote down, as he always did with a good story. Larry said he was once in a production of one of the Shakespeare histories and an actor called Dan Cunningham was playing a messenger, and one matinée with Olivier on stage Cunningham was standing in the wings having a fag and thought, “It’s bloody quiet on stage. Oh, shit! I’ve missed my cue!” So he stubbed the fag out, rushed on stage, flung himself at Larry’s feet, and said, “My liege, the Duke of Buckingham is slain this hour.” Now that presented problems because the Duke of Buckingham hadn’t even been on yet and had an awful lot of plot. So Larry said, “I gripped him very firmly by the arm and said, ‘Thou liest, sirrah!’ ” So Cunningham thought, “Christ! Larry’s dried!” so he started to make up Shakespearean doggerel and said, “Nay, my liege, I swear, by yonder thicket he lies all covered in gore.” So Larry then applied a real tourniquet on his arm and said, “Is’t positive, sirrah?” and he said, “Yea, my liege, I swear by all that is holy, the Duke of Buckingham is slain this hour,” whereupon Larry said “I gripped him by the throat, turned him upstage, and said, ‘Then, by my troth, thou hast fucketh the entire play!’ ” And Larry said nobody in the audience even realised!’

Buoyed by this addition to his hoard of anecdotes, Niv chatted up the air hostess and ‘I expect when he got off the plane he asked her for a drink,’ said Forbes, ‘and laughed her into bed.’ His bonhomie vanished again, however, when he suffered a very painful attack of sciatica down his right leg and then flew back to Nice via London and found that there were still no copies of his books in the Heathrow shops. He complained again to Greenfield and a fortnight later was irritated even more when Greenfield seemed to have broken one of the basic rules of agenting by giving his address to a complete stranger, who wrote to ask if he would collaborate on an illustrated cocktail recipe book. ‘STOP IT DAMMIT,’ he wrote furiously to Greenfield, and was angered again five days later when he suspected that Greenfield or his assistant had given his telephone number to a French publisher. ‘I have an agent to defend me from trap-baiting creeps like this!’ he wrote sarcastically. He recovered his good humour sufficiently by Christmas to send Grizel her biggest present yet, £5000 (about £22,000 today), and Joyce £1500 (£6700 today), but he was to excel even his own remarkable generosity in 1977 by sending his sisters cheques that totalled £13,000 (£49,000 today).

In February 1977 Niv forced himself to interrupt his skiing and return to England to undergo yet again the grind of promoting another book, this time the British paperback edition of
Bring on the Empty Horses
, of which Coronet already had a million copies in print. ‘He hated doing it,’ Alan Gordon Walker told me, ‘and at times he wasn’t terribly happy. There was a hard centre behind the twinkle in his eye, and if things didn’t work he would let people know pretty quickly.’ During the tour he recorded a
Desert Island Discs
radio programme for which he chose eight favourite records: ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ by Blue Mink, ‘Amazing Grace’ by the band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, ‘Never Say Goodbye’ by Gloria Gaynor, Verdi’s ‘Celesta Aida’, ‘Rock Your Baby’ by George McCrae, Maria Callas singing the ‘Bell Song’ from
Lakmé
by Delibes, ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’ from
South Pacific
by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Laurence Olivier delivering the ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’ speech from Shakespeare’s
Henry V
. Asked to choose one luxury for his desert island, he chose – of course – a double bed.

He delighted his crippled ex-editor Phil Evans by going to see him out in the London suburb of Chiswick, and after he returned to Château d’Oex wrote to say: ‘I cannot tell you, dear friend, how impressed I am with your recovery and please keep up with those dull exercises because they seem to have done miracles for you already.’

Back at Lo Scoglietto he gave an interview to a reporter from the
Telegraph Sunday Magazine
who found the house ‘slightly cold and stiff, as if taken too directly from magazine pages’, and who recalled the dismissive remark of a colleague who had sneered about Niv: ‘Can anyone still fall for that oh-so-British, jolly-grand-sport line of his? Niven is the quintessential sham: so greedy and unsure of himself that he switched his own personality, whatever that really is, for a phoney one.’ But he was quickly seduced by David’s graciousness and generosity, came to like him very much and was disarmed by his modesty when he said: ‘I’m not a writer. I’ve just had two accidental successes [
and
] my acting talent is extremely moderate … I’ve made a wonderful living out of very, very little.’ Niv added engagingly, ‘The key to actors is that they want to be liked … If a little old lady from Ghana were to walk in now, I’d hope she’d like me. I’m sitting here hoping
you
like me. And anxious that you don’t, that I’m not being what you want me to be, not telling you what you want to hear.’

Niv’s difficulties with writing the novel were to continue for several years and often he nearly gave up. Apparently he still had ‘thirty-two people stuck in a lighthouse at the moment and every time I sit down to write some more another three arrive by boat’, he told the
Sunday Express
.
Greenfield urged him to write a book about his war and call it
Niven at Arms
, saying he could easily get advances totalling £250,000 – £1 million today – for it, but Niv had sworn never to talk about the war. His American publisher John Dodds, editor-in-chief of Putnam’s, urged him to write a novel that David had himself once suggested, about a highly decorated war hero who knows that the act of great courage that won him his medals had in fact been one of cowardice. Niv had imagined that after the war the hero would go into a seedy decline on the French Riviera, and Dodds now suggested mischievously that he could make the hero ‘a second-rate film star’.

Much as David liked the popular and respected Dodds his relationship with Putnam’s was about to end in tatters. In June he heard that in America a Mrs Vera Amey had threatened to sue for libel because of a passage in
Bring on the Empty Horses
that described a brothel in old Hollywood where the madam’s little daughter had sat playing with her dolls at the foot of the stairs while the clients went up and down. Mrs Amey claimed to have been the little girl and demanded damages. Niv had mentioned no names or an address but Putnam’s decided it would be cheaper to settle out of court, paid Mrs Amey $6000 (£14,000 today) without consulting him, deducted half from his next royalty payment and told him to write her a letter of apology as part of the agreed settlement. He was enraged. With huge reluctance he wrote the letter, telling her that he had mentioned no names and had intended to offend no one, but he never forgave Putnam’s for not giving him the chance to fight the case. Fairly or not, he blamed the company’s President, Walter Minton, whom he called ‘he of the slippery sneakers and smelly socks’, and swore that Putnam’s would never publish another of his books even though they had an option on his next. ‘I recall very little contact with Niven, have never had a pair of slippery shoes and change my socks daily,’ Minton, now a lawyer, told me in 2002. ‘But it is not unusual for the head
of a publishing house to be the fall man if anything goes against an author’s wishes.’ He also pointed out that Niv had wanted an advance of $1 million for his next book and since Putnam’s would never have paid that much he would in any case have had to go to another publisher. ‘David had a very considerable regard for money,’ said Minton, and a fortnight after hearing about Mrs Amey Niv was lining up yet another possible source of income by agreeing in exchange for commission to let the British aircraft company Hawker Siddeley Aviation know if he could come up with potential purchasers of their new $3½ million HS 125–700 business jet. ‘Will keep eyes and ears peeled,’ he promised. The millionaire film star bestselling author and lecturer was now an aircraft salesman too.