Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (53 page)

Motor Neurone Disease, MND, which is known in the USA as Lou Gehrig’s Disease after the baseball player who contracted it, is a mysterious affliction that attacks the spinal cord and motor neurones in the brain, which send electrical instructions to the muscles. Its cause is still unknown, there is no cure, and it affects victims in different ways and at different speeds. Muscles weaken and waste in the arms or legs, then in the face and throat, making it difficult to speak, chew and swallow. Usually unaffected are the intellect, eyes, smell, taste, hearing, touch and sexual performance, and the disease is not contagious, but it is always fatal within two or three years. In September 2002 scientists at Columbia University in New York reported that the disease seems bizarrely to attack the very fittest and slimmest people, like Niv, especially athletes, maybe because vigorous exercise weakens an athlete’s resistance to stress, increases the absorption of environmental toxins and speeds up the transport of toxins to the brain. In 2003 it was reported that dozens of highly fit young Italian professional soccer players had contracted MND and the only thing they all had in common apart from football was that they had all been treated at some time with anti-inflammatory drugs. So had Niv for more than ten years, for pain in his leg and foot, but it is impossible to know whether that had anything to do with his affliction.

Vaughan urged him to cancel his American coast-to-coast promotion tour but he had promised and insisted on doing it, flying in just a few days from New York to Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston. Within a month the book had entered the top twenty list, ‘but we didn’t earn even half of our advance,’ said Vaughan. ‘It was something of a disappointment except that we all liked David so much that we didn’t go round with long faces.’

Before returning to Europe he went sailing with Vaughan and Buckley, clenched some ropes, and then had trouble unclenching his fingers. The disease was beginning to take a firm grip. Back in Switzerland Peter Viertel urged him to see a neurologist for a second opinion, and he did, but the diagnosis was the same. ‘When he got the news he was incredibly gallant,’ said Viertel, and Jess Morgan said, ‘I spent a couple of days with him in Switzerland just after he returned from the Mayo Clinic and had got the news that there was no hope, and he was philosophical and joking about it. He said, “When it gets too bad I’ll just get in my wheelchair and go over the side of that mountain over there.” That was a typical Niven joke. He had a wonderful light philosophy of life. He was one of the most wonderful friends I’ve ever had.’

At the end of November two more deaths underlined how little time he had left. On 18 November Joyce’s heart gave out and she died in London aged eighty-one. She left him a diamond and sapphire brooch that had belonged to their mother and most of the rest of her estate of £152,927 (about £368,000 today) to her late husband’s brother and his children. A fortnight later Niv was devastated to hear that Natalie Wood had drowned mysteriously at sea off Santa Catalina Island in the early hours of 29 November, perhaps after falling off their boat after a boozy dinner ashore with R. J. Wagner and her current co-star, Christopher Walken. She was only forty-three. Niv was distraught and persuaded R. J. to join him as soon as possible in Switzerland, where he promised to find a chalet for him and his two small children. ‘He’d gone through the same thing with Primmie,’ R. J. told me, ‘and he was so compassionate and loving to me. When we drove to Switzerland he waited in a snowstorm for four and a half hours for us to come up from Geneva so that he could lead us to this chalet that he’d found and stocked for us. He was a true, true friend, caring for me and on the phone every day.’

With Joyce dead, Niv gave seventy-four-year-old Grizel a
bigger Christmas present than ever, £11,000 (about £26,000 today) which must have been especially welcome because her studio in Fulham had recently been burgled, her possessions smashed, and her precious tools for carving wood and stone stolen. By now she had exhibited her sculptures all over the world, but she was so shocked by the burglary that she was unable to work for several months. ‘Daddy was very fond of her,’ said Kristina, who was now doing a languages course in London and was soon to work briefly in a London kindergarten.

Niv signed yet another generous cheque in February, this time for £2000 (more than £4400 today) which he sent to Trubshawe in Sussex after hearing that he had hit hard times and was battling to care for his wife, who had Alzheimer’s Disease. ‘She behaves just like a small child of ten,’ wrote Trubshawe, saying he was so exhausted trying to look after her that he had to get away for a ten-day break. ‘It is a nightmare.’ Despite their estrangement Niv immediately offered him money and after wrestling with his conscience for a week Trubshawe replied, ‘My dear old David,’ and gratefully accepted the money ‘
most reluctantly
’ because he was broke and had to find someone to help look after his wife at weekends to ease the pressure. He ended ‘with
very
much love’ and wrote at least once more to say that he had hired an elderly woman to help him. ‘Much love dear chum – and immense gratitude,’ he wrote. Niv did not burden him with his own problem but said merely that he was suffering from ‘a pinched nerve in the neck, fuck it’.

It was soon obvious that
Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly
was never going to take off, neither in Britain nor the USA. Reviews and sales were disappointing, and Vaughan told Greenfield that they all needed to think long and hard about what sort of book David should write next if he was to come even close to earning his huge two-book advance. In Britain Rainbird was offering him £100,000 to write captions for yet another projected coffee-table book of Hollywood photos,
but in the end he decided to write another novel, an anti-IRA thriller with several autobiographical touches: its hero has joined the army after twice seeing
The Charge of the Light Brigade
– ‘this brilliant piece of army recruiting’ – and enduring ‘the ghastly rigours of Sandhurst’, and is now serving in Northern Ireland, where his best friend is Donkey Doubleday, ‘always known as Donkey to his friends owing to the really enormous size of his member while Donkey’s soldiers fondly referred to him as Excused Shorts’.

Niv soon tired of this story, abandoned it after forty-five handwritten pages, and after agonising for weeks came up with another subject and started scrawling again in longhand in four green notebooks, this time a story with a horse-racing background about a thirty-year-old divorced author who has an affair with a beautiful eighteen-year-old schoolgirl in Switzerland – like Kristina’s mother, Mona Gunnarson, perhaps, from the school just across the road from the chalet – and another with a girl who likes being tied up when making love. He wrote 200 pages before giving the book up as well because he had thought of a much more powerful idea and began to write a dreadfully poignant novel about an author with a house in the South of France, an alcoholic Swedish wife and motor neurone disease. His hero, Sandy, whose name is later changed to Ian, has just returned after an exhausting book promotion tour in the States – ‘he felt like a whore doing it but once more it had paid off’ – and a checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, and is sitting in the garden of his lovely home on the Côte d’Azur near his little boat,
Ladybird
:

That was how he felt and reacted over the last few months of his life as the disease took hold and squeezed the life out of him. ‘I wrote him letters increasingly conscious that they and the writing of the book were important to him,’ Vaughan told me. ‘This was beyond all business. It was friendship. He enjoyed writing, and as he said in one of his letters, writing was his lease on life at the end. He said, “This is all I have,” and that was pretty poignant. He was an actor who had lost his voice and so the voice was flowing through his fingers.’

In the unpublished novel Sandy’s Swedish wife, Ulla, still seems to care for him and her drinking is not yet completely out of control, but in real life Hjördis’s boozing was worse than ever. ‘She had blackouts,’ Jamie told me, ‘and she fell and broke her leg again. She drank upstairs, on her own, and he told me that they found bottles all over the house all the time. She was drinking easily a bottle of vodka a day, he told me. The fundamental problem with Hjördis was that she didn’t seem to
get
it. How could you not think this was an interesting, funny man? How could you not want to read his
books? How could you not be proud of his success?’ The only possible answer is that Hjördis was jealous of him, or mistrusted his success, or was simply by now so alcoholic that she was too helpless to be rational, but ‘I don’t think there was ever anything
helpless
about this woman,’ said Robert Wagner sharply, and Betty Bacall said, ‘She was so terrible to David during the last couple of years of his life. She wasn’t there for him ever when he needed her. She was drunk, with men, and could not function finally at all.’ Anastasia Mann told me: ‘I truly believe that Hjördis was evil. She was horrible to David. Towards the end he could hardly speak and she said to me gloatingly, “Isn’t it ironic that a man who relied so much on his voice can’t even make himself understood?” She was actually
gloating
.’ Ustinov agreed: ‘I’m sure she must have hated him. She was capable of hatred.’ Doreen Hawkins and April Clavell both said Hjördis thought Niv was having her watched and followed. ‘She became very strange,’ said Mrs Clavell. ‘Her mind was not working rationally,’ and Valerie Youmans said, ‘She was just an awful woman.’ Finally, according to Pat Medina: ‘It was a finished marriage by then. Poor Nivy. Poor Nivy.’

He was still determined not to lose his sense of humour. ‘We saw him skiing cross-country towards the end,’ said Mrs Youmans, ‘and he said, “By God, I’ve finally got quick enough to pass somebody! I went whizzing by, but then I turned around and she was about ninety years old!” And then he dropped his glove and said to my husband, “Would you please pick it up for me? I can’t.” ’

In February Niv’s old lover Virginia Bruce died in California of cancer, aged seventy-one, and his friend Lesley Rowlatt, who was now thirty-five and working in advertising in New York, married a
Sunday Times
journalist, Peter Watson. ‘People may have thought that she was American because she’d lived all her life there and was very feisty,’ Watson told me. ‘When we came back to London we went to Harrods to buy a bigger bed but nobody helped us and eventually Lesley, this
statuesquely beautiful woman, bellowed across at these three salesmen, “Who do I have to fuck to buy a bed in this place?” From time to time Niven would ring up and she would have lunch with him, and she’d get dressed up to the nines. It didn’t bother me because I knew almost from the start that our marriage wasn’t right: it should have been just a fling.’ Niv introduced Lesley to Kristina in London. ‘I met her a couple of times,’ said Kristina. ‘She was very attractive. Daddy presented her to me and said, “This is a friend of mine.” I knew her as Lesley Watson and never knew her maiden name.’

In March 1982 Niv made a final trip to Hollywood, where Roddy Mann was now living, writing a column for the
Los Angeles Times
, and took him on a sentimental journey back to all his old haunts including the Pink House, which was still owned by Phil Kellogg. ‘He was filled with nostalgia for what now seemed to him a more joyous time, a period when Hollywood was fun and relatively carefree,’ said Mann. Then it was back to the South of France to shoot his last two movies, with Roger Moore and R. J. Wagner, because although he was really too ill to make them he had promised the director, Blake Edwards, that he would. For the first time he told several old friends how ill he really was and received a reply from Laurence Olivier that began ‘Darling boy’ and ended, ‘Thank you again my lovely boy for your angelic letter. I really think we had better meet don’t you, and quick? … All my love dearest friend in the world. Yr devoted Larry.’ In his letter to ‘Dearest “Phillippo” ’ Evans, Niv wrote: ‘Struck down by a real “nasty” – Motor Neuron Disease and
deeply
resentful! Why
US
? But you are the leader of the brave ones bless you for the example.’

The two new movies were filmed at the same time:
The Trail of the Pink Panther
and
The Curse of the Pink Panther
, two sequels that were put together with out-takes of Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau scenes from previous Panther films. Niv played The Phantom, Sir Charles Lytton, again and although
his part was very small Edwards gave him top billing because everyone realised that he would never make another movie. ‘After doing the last scene,’ said R. J. Wagner, ‘tears rolled out of my eyes because he said, “I’m afraid you’ve just seen the last of an actor who had quite a career.” ’ But now his voice was so weak and slurred that his lines had to be re-recorded by an American impressionist, Rich Little, who made the mistake of telling the Press that he had dubbed Niv’s voice. David was mortified and his distress now was such that another actor on the final Panther film, Herb Tanney, said to him gently, ‘David, we’re all leaving the party soon. It’s not just you.’