Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (49 page)

Putnam’s were not the only people that summer to anger him. At sixty-seven he was becoming decidedly grumpy and told the
Evening Standard
that his life at Lo Scoglietto was being ruined by gin-swilling dentists from Dresden and other vulgar types who had taken to roaring across the bay of Beaulieu in their powerboats. He was not delighted either when Rex Harrison bought a villa nearby on Cap Ferrat. Harrison was jealous of Niv’s popularity as well as his success with
The Moon’s a Balloon
, and Niv had come to dislike him deeply – like everyone who knew Harrison – because he was so rude, arrogant and selfish. ‘Rex was kind of an asshole,’ Charlton Heston told me – ‘one of the top five most unpleasant men you’ve ever met,’ said Patrick Macnee – and Roddy Mann told me: ‘Noël Coward said, “When you realise Rex’s real name is Reg it tells you everything.” ’

John Mortimer had to go once to see Harrison on Cap Ferrat about a film script and rang Niv first to arrange to meet for dinner afterwards. Moments later, Mortimer recalled, ‘the phone rang and Rex Harrison’s voice said, “I just want to say something to you before you come. I just want to make it clear that you’re a complete
shit
and you always have been.” My eyes misted over with tears and then there was a great
big laugh and that was Niven impersonating him. It was so exactly the sort of thing that Rex Harrison
would
do. Nobody liked Rex. He
was
a shit, an appalling man. He once called his agent’s wife a “clockwork cunt” because she thought a play he was in was a little too long!’ Leslie Bricusse once asked Harrison if he and Niv had fallen out because they had to compete for the same roles. ‘Oh no,’ sneered Harrison. ‘Niven was always a
light
comedian and I’m a
high
comedian.’

‘When Rex came to live in Cap Ferrat he was very offended that David didn’t welcome him with an amazing lunch,’ Evie Bricusse told me at her home in St Paul de Vence, ‘so we had a lunch here and I put them opposite each other. They declared undying love to each other and never saw each other again! They just didn’t like each other.’

In October 1977 Niv flew to Egypt to join Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury in making
Death on the Nile
, an Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot murder mystery – apprehensively because he was wary of Egyptian food and ordered a series of Fortnum’s hampers to be sent out to Cairo. In vain: the entire cast went down with stomach trouble, Niv himself inconveniently while riding a camel. He was appalled by the flies and 130° heat but kept his cool. When Maggie Smith arrived exhausted, harassed and bedraggled after a long three-leg flight from Toronto to Luxor during which her luggage was lost, David greeted her at the airport, ‘cool, smiling and immaculate as always, with a large bunch of flowers in his arms and a bottle of champagne on ice!’ she told Peter Haining. ‘It was
so
typical of him!… I simply burst into tears!’

The film was one of the most enjoyable he made: elegant, amusing, vividly atmospheric and beautifully photographed. Ustinov was splendid as Poirot investigating the murder of an heiress on a Nile river steamer in the 1930s, Maggie Smith and Bette Davis were excellent playing themselves, and Angela Lansbury was wonderful as a drunken writer who dances an hilarious tango with Niv. He played himself as
usual, as Poirot’s bland English-gent lawyer and assistant, but halfway through the film he suddenly looks much older, gaunt and stressed, with haunted eyes. The reason was that in the middle of shooting the film, on 4 November, Kristina was nearly killed in a terrible car crash in Switzerland. Niv rushed to the hospital in Lausanne. For eight days she lay in a coma, for months she was dangerously ill, and he was desperately distressed and worried. In a few days he lost a great deal of weight and much of his sparkle, and was never the same again. Kristina’s accident marked the beginning of the end of his life and may have triggered the dreadful disease that was to kill him.