Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (55 page)

At the end of February Niv and Hjördis flew to London, where he spent ten days in the Wellington Hospital at St John’s Wood under the name David Snook, maybe to cock one at the Press, who were now aware that he was seriously ill and following his every move. ‘Lesley was very upset when he was there,’ said Peter Watson, whose marriage to her was to end a few weeks later. ‘Hjördis was quite possessive so Lesley said, “I’m just going to walk around the clinic. I want to be near him. You don’t mind, do you?” She borrowed the car and just drove around in a circle. If Niven’s friends were urging him to marry somebody else at the end of his life I think it must have been her. She really adored him and she’d have made him happy.’ Five years later Lesley Watson married fifty-seven-year-old Viscount Hambleden, and she refused to talk to me about her friendship with Niv.

He made a farewell visit to the Connaught and ‘when he was leaving it that last time,’ his daughter-in-law Fernanda told me tearfully, ‘they had to take him on a stretcher out the back so the Press wouldn’t see, and he said, “Oh my God, I haven’t paid my bill,” and they said, “we’re picking up this one.” They all loved him.’ And then she cried again.

He returned on 7 March to Château d’Oex, where Fiona Thyssen saw him as his life ebbed. ‘It was terribly sad,’ she said. ‘His hands were always so cold and he would sit next to me and say, “Fiona, hold my hand,” and I’d sit holding his hand to try to make him warm.’ Soon he could no longer eat in public because he could not control his lips or saliva, or swallow properly, and he hated to be seen drooling. Richard Burton came to visit and told his wife, Sally: ‘God, he’s so wonderful. He’s really ill but he’s telling jokes about his awful condition.’ John Mortimer turned up too. ‘When I got to the house,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘Niven came downstairs, gently, almost soundlessly, like a ghost, and when he spoke only the faintest sounds came out of him. “What about
a jar?” he greeted me. So we sat and drank white wine and he told me about all the cures he had tried … We sat together for a long time, until the sun had vanished, and I could hardly hear him when he said: “I think it’s having talked far too much during my life that’s taken my voice away.” ’ George Greenfield said in his autobiography that Niv’s voice eventually became ‘a succession of dalek-like sounds’.

While Niv was in the Wellington Hospital, Hjördis met a doctor there who was to become a close friend of hers and turned up on the Côte d’Azur when they returned to Lo Scoglietto for the summer. Kristina and Fiona both disliked him. ‘He was in his early forties and I think there was some Russian or Albanian blood in him,’ said Kristina, ‘but he spoke German and English fluently, though I didn’t like it that he kept bringing bottles of drink for my mother.’ Fiona told me: ‘I think he was Eastern European. I thought he was dreadful and he may have been having something with Mummy. He was younger than her but she swore by him. He came to the house once with some medical equipment and tried to give Daddy some medication but the nurse said “no”. The nurse told me that he was getting a big box of something sent from England for Daddy, and they were all by the pool at one point and Mummy said, “I’m going in with the doctor and we’re going to open up the box,” and a couple of hours later Daddy came in and the box was still sitting where it had been, which brought into question what they were doing. I didn’t want to know. I
hated
him.’ Doreen Hawkins once flew from Heathrow to Nice on the same plane as the doctor and as they emerged from the Customs area ‘there was Hjördis waiting, and her face lit up when she saw him, and she wouldn’t give me a lift to Cap Ferrat, which normally she would have. She said, “This is David’s doctor,” and I thought, “Well, he isn’t actually,” because I knew David’s doctor. It was awful to see David at the end. He was losing the use of his hands and voice and said, “I keep thinking about Jack all the time. I know what it was like, now.” ’

Another of Hjördis’s admirers was a forty-three-year-old Anglo-Italian painter who lived in Monaco, Andrew Vicari, who became her lover just before Niv died. ‘I adored Hjördis,’ he told me, ‘and I’m proud to have been her lover. She was an extraordinary woman, very beautiful, spectacular, a sort of Viking, a Valkyrie. I went to Lo Scoglietto when David was alive and not yet ill and he regaled us with stories, but they seemed to be an ill-matched, incompatible couple. They were two of the nicest people I’ve ever met, but she was a
Swede
, and he
knew
that, and she went her own way, and she told me that he used to fuck around all over the place. She had very little sentimentality, whereas Niven was the king of sentiment. I don’t know whether he was upset by my fling with her. Maybe. She also told me that he went to a special clinic in Switzerland where they injected him with lambs’ testicles, like Charlie Chaplin.’

Niv tried to walk and swim every day with Katherine the nurse and enjoyed a regular evening drive with her around the Cap, but he was weakening fast and by now Hjördis had become blatantly cruel to him. She decided to have the house redecorated even though he was distressed by the strong smell of paint and the noise of the workmen. Soon he could barely walk, write, speak or swallow and ‘she would get up from the table,’ Ken Annakin told me, ‘and say, “There he is. Look at him. He can’t tell any of his stories now!” ’ Roger Moore told me that a few weeks before Niv died his only exercise was to swim in the pool with a rubber ring: ‘He came out and said to her, haltingly and croaking, “I – swam – two – lengths,” and she said, “
Aren’t
we a clever boy?” I wanted to kill her.’ There were even ‘stories of her swimming in the pool with younger men – helpers, chauffeurs, staff – and flaunting herself and flirting with them in front of Niv, who by then couldn’t swim,’ said David Bolton. ‘She despised him, I suppose.’ Yet despite her own infidelities, said Fiona, she became paranoid about Katherine Matthewson, accused her of having an affair with Niv, and once locked her out on the
roof and went out leaving Niv on his own, bedridden. David was indeed very fond of Katherine and one of his last photographs shows him walking hand-in-hand with her at Lo Scoglietto. Even so, said April Clavell, ‘he was still infatuated with Hjördis at the end, the way he used to look at her. I think there was genuine love there.’

Many of his friends came to say goodbye: the Bricusses, Willie Feilding, Bryan Forbes, the Manns, Roger Moore, John Mortimer. ‘His clothes hung loosely on his wasted frame but the blue eyes still twinkled,’ said Mann, and his wife Anastasia added, ‘All he could do was to make these gurgling sounds, and when we left he stood at the gate and waved and waved until we were out of sight.’ Feilding told me that ‘at the end he couldn’t have flowers around because the pollen made the MND worse, so I drew him lots of pictures of flowers which he stuck up.’ Moore and Forbes flew to the Côte d’Azur together even though Hjördis tried to prevent them. ‘He came downstairs in a blazer and silk scarf,’ recalled Forbes, ‘and to my shame I did what a lot of people do to people in wheelchairs: I started to talk very precisely and loudly to him, and almost his last words to me were when he said haltingly, “I may be dying but I’m not fucking deaf!” We all laughed.’ Then, said Moore, ‘Bryan spotted the pool through the window and said, “Getting plenty of swimming?” and Niv started to laugh, which turned into tears because there was no difference between laughter and crying.’

Both his sons flew over from America that summer and took him walking around the harbours at Beaulieu and St Jean. One evening a young woman approached them and said to Niv, ‘I just want you to know how much joy you have given my family and me over the years. I want you to know that there are so many people who love you.’ Several days later Jamie had to return to New York: ‘I said goodbye for the last time,’ he wrote in
You
. ‘He was in the garden, sitting at a table in the sun, looking very small surrounded by the trees and flowers he had planted years before and loved so much
… When I said I would see him again soon, he shook his head sadly and said with great difficulty, “Bye, boy.” ’ He never saw him again.

On 12 June another old friend, Norma Shearer, died of pneumonia in California aged eighty-one, and Niv said his own goodbyes to friends whom he had not seen for years in letters that took him a couple of painful minutes to write each line. Just before he died he wrote ‘a wonderful, pathetic letter’ to Deborah Kerr, his ‘Hilda’, ‘that made her cry and she had to go into another room to weep’, said Peter Viertel. In it he warned her to beware of working too hard and taking on too much: ‘dear old chum,’ he wrote, ‘don’t stretch the elastic too far, because it snaps, and that is what has happened to me.’ He wrote to Anthony Quayle that he had discovered what he had always suspected, that he was a coward – ‘not true,’ said Quayle, ‘he had great courage.’ He wrote to the boys’ old nanny, ‘Pinkie’ Rogers, and to Phil Evans: ‘I fear I am not in your league when it comes to facing up to things.’ To help him face up to things a Dr M. M. Bhamgara of Bombay sent him a little story, ‘Footprints’, by an unknown author, that may have given him some comfort because he kept it until the end:

The tranquillity of Niv’s last days on the Côte d’Azur was cruelly shattered when a paparazzo used a telescopic lens to photograph him in the garden at Lo Scoglietto and the harrowing picture, showing him skeletal and gasping for air, was published disgracefully in the English tabloid the
Sun
on 13 July. ‘We got that son of a bitch photographer,’ said R. J. Wagner. ‘He’s not taking pictures any more.’ David was distraught and decided to fly with Katherine, who was now calling him Pop, to Château d’Oex, where there was less chance of such intrusions. Hjördis chose to stay behind, even though he had only a few more days to live, and he flew by Swissair because he thought he could not afford to charter a plane as usual. ‘The nurse was kind but otherwise he was always alone,’ said Hedi Donizetti. ‘It was awful. He had nobody to cook for him so he sent a man in the jeep from Château d’Oex to the Olden and we prepared special soups with fish and nourishing things that he could take with a straw.’ Fernanda Niven told me: ‘When he was dying we were upset that he did not have the comfort he should have had.’

Every day David Bolton called in for physiotherapy and Niv tried to swim in Gunther Sachs’s indoor pool at Gstaad, but he was failing fast and began to talk to Katherine about death, saying he would like to be reincarnated as a cat, and every night they knelt together and prayed. ‘Often it was just him and her in the chalet,’ said Bolton,

Years earlier Niv had told John Hurt that he was terrified of death and would never let himself suffer at the end: ‘He said he had a little doctor in Switzerland who would come and put a needle in him if he ever got anything like exactly what he did get, but when it came to it he didn’t. He couldn’t bear the idea of ending it all.’ Eleven years later Hjördis claimed that just before Niv left Lo Scoglietto for the last time he had begged her to commit suicide with him. In an interview with Victor Davis of the
Mail on Sunday
she claimed that Niv had croaked feebly, ‘We’ll dive into the pool hand-in-hand. Go down three times but only come up twice,’ and that from then on she ‘was careful to make sure he was never left on his own’. She added genially, ‘Of course I knew he had other women. David was very wicked.’

Niv and Katherine were not entirely alone at the chalet. Fiona was there at times during his last two weeks and Hjördis’s Swedish nephew, Michael Winstrad, arrived to help lift him. For some reason Hjördis disapproved of this. ‘She rang from Cap Ferrat and told Michael his mother was dying and he ought to go back to Sweden,’ Fiona told me. ‘This upset both Michael and Daddy and was completely untrue. Who knows why she did it?’ David Jr and Jamie were in the
States, though Jamie was due to come to Switzerland in the first week of August. Kristina was in Geneva, and just before the end Fiona had to go down to her flat there too for a couple of days to get a driving licence.

On Tuesday, 26 July, as a sort of macabre dress rehearsal, Niv’s butler Emile Andrey, his cook’s husband, died. David too was sinking fast. On the Wednesday night he was deeply distressed to receive a drunken telephone call from Hjördis at Lo Scoglietto. ‘She was very cruel about his illness and how he was no longer a man, and she flaunted her lovers in his face,’ said David Bolton. ‘She refused to come to Switzerland to care for him and he knew he did not have long to go. He had tears in his eyes and her photo on his desk, and he choked as he spoke due to the illness and the emotion. It was a very sad scene indeed.’ Niv could not sleep that night and sat up late telling Katherine about Primmie. Bolton saw him again the following morning and ‘he looked like a man who had had a minor heart attack. I sent him home, put him on oxygen, and sent for the local doctor.’ Hjördis’s cruelty had finally left him nothing to live for. Katherine telephoned David and Jamie in the States to ask if she should get him into hospital or put him on a respirator, but they told her to do neither because he had made them promise never to put him on any life support machine. That night once again she sat chatting with him until late and ‘he suddenly began talking again about Primmie,’ she told Morley, ‘and how happy they had been together and how different his life would have been if she had not been killed.’ He fell asleep at about 3 a.m. but when she looked in on him at 7 a.m. on the Friday morning, 29 July, he gave her a thumbs-up sign and she went to make some coffee. ‘Just as I got to the bottom of the stairs I heard a sort of noise, as though he’d been trying to get out of bed, and when I got back into his room he had the oxygen mask off and gave me a big smile and held my hand and away he went. As quickly as that.’ He was seventy-three.