Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (36 page)

Niv decided to live in Château d’Oex – which is pronounced ‘Day’ – rather than Gstaad, where the skiing is much better, because it was in the canton of Vaud rather than Berne and the tax was a little lower, I was told in Gstaad by seventy-five-year-old Hedi Donizetti, who owned and ran the Olden Hotel, where David ate almost every day when he was at Château d’Oex. The Nivens moved into the chalet that spring and sent the boys to a school in Lausanne, the Lycée Jacard, which was on Lake Geneva in the suburb of Pully, twenty-five miles away. The change of school came at exactly the right time for David Jr since he had just been expelled from St Paul’s in New Hampshire for buying beer. ‘Daddy was furious,’ David told me, ‘because he thought it was a stupid thing to be expelled for’ – apparently forgetting that he had himself been expelled for sending dog droppings through the post.

Sadly the move to Switzerland failed to repair the marriage. ‘Hjördis was a pest,’ Mrs Donizetti told me.

As Jamie said to me about Hjördis, ‘This was a woman who didn’t love him, who didn’t think he was funny, who didn’t try and be helpful with his friends, who was constantly fighting with his children, who was just very difficult and resented his success.’

Hjördis gave the
Sunday Mirror
an interview the following month and remarked with astounding condescension about David, ‘He is a worrier. He worries about little things, like catching a plane or having people to dinner. He worries about his future, about money. He is a good husband – because he worries.’ He seems to have had a lot to worry about. In September she gave another interview, this time to the
Daily Mail
, in which she admitted that he was ‘the most even-tempered man imaginable, but I can always start an argument if I dare to criticise his friends’. She added, as though surprised, ‘I often feel that women don’t like me.’ Yet Niv tried so hard to make the marriage work that when he was offered
the starring role in
Lolita
that year he consulted Hjördis and then turned it down because she disapproved of him playing a middle-aged lecher obsessed by a twelve-year-old girl. The role would have stretched him as much as the ‘major’ in
Separate Tables
and could have given his reputation a huge boost, but he rejected it for the sake of a woman who did not love him and knew nothing about acting. The part went instead to his wartime
bête noire
James Mason.

With the marriage as miserable as ever, Hjördis mainly in Switzerland and Niv filming
The Guns of Navarone
in England that summer, he compensated for his unhappiness by having an affair with a beautiful young English model and seriously thought of leaving Hjördis to live with her. ‘I thought then that he was going to leave Hjördis for sure and get divorced,’ Jamie told me, but he refused to tell me the name of his father’s new love ‘as she is very much alive and it could cause some harm in her current relationship’. One beautiful young English girl with whom Niv later claimed to have had a fling that summer was Sally Croker Poole, who had married Lord James Crichton-Stuart the previous year but whose marriage was already a failure. She was only nineteen, Niv was fifty, and nine years later she was to marry Karim Aga Khan and become Princess Salimah, the Begum Aga Khan.

Sally denies having had an affair with Niv. ‘I absolutely adored David,’ she told me at her sumptuous home in Switzerland overlooking Lake Geneva. ‘He was the sweetest man, very kind, and I hero-worshipped him. He was such terribly good company, not a bit like an old fart, but I was just a kid.’ They met when she was shown around the Shepperton Studios set of
The Guns of Navarone
and he joined her, her husband and several of their young friends for dinner. ‘I went to watch him filming six or seven times and we’d go back to London in the evening and go to the Mirabelle – here, there and everywhere – in a gang of young people, and he was adorable to everybody.’

Sally also met David Jr and Jamie, who were seventeen and
fourteen, played tennis with them at Hurlingham and took them for walks in the park. ‘It was like having a couple of younger brothers,’ she said. As for Hjördis, ‘there was this terrible iciness and tension between them and they never talked to each other. She’d walk into my tiny mews house in Cromwell Gardens and there’d be lots of people, but as she walked in everyone froze and she made the whole thing fall apart. She was this beautiful ice lady, very frozen, with thick make-up. The men did look at her because she was so beautiful, but she never gave anything. I think he could be pretty sad inside. He talked about Primmie with such love, about what a tragedy it was. He adored her, and I think he never got over it.’

So was it Sally that Niv wanted to marry? ‘I don’t think so,’ said Princess Salimah, ‘but I think the boys would have liked that. He never asked me to marry him and we didn’t have any naughty weekends together. I wish we had! I
wish
we
had
!’ She saw him only once more, for lunch in New York in the late 1960s, just before she married the Aga Khan. In the meantime ‘he wrote me the most lovely, adorable letters’, she said, ‘so funny – I could
kill
myself for getting rid of them – and he called me Sal-Pal and always signed them with some absolutely ridiculous name, like Fogworthy.’

In November Noël Coward lunched with the Nivens at Château d’Oex and wrote in his diary: ‘Oh dear, I fear Hjördis will
never
make a good housekeeper. The lunch was fairly dreadful and the house
could
be made charming but I doubt if it will be.’ Coward obviously brought out the best in her because when he went for lunch again nine days later he described them in his diary as ‘the dear Nivens’, and after another visit for lunch during the summer he wrote: ‘Hjördis very gay and charming, but fairly silly as usual.’

Later in November Niv returned to England to shoot some dangerous sea scenes for
The Guns of Navarone
in a huge tank of icy water. The water was filthy, he cut his lip, it turned septic, and he had to be taken to Guy’s Hospital in London
where he became so ill with general septicaemia that the doctors thought he might die. Executives from Columbia flew in from the States to discuss just how they might handle such a disaster with the film still not finished. Niv struggled bravely out of bed against doctors’ orders, completed the last three days of shooting, and then went down again, seriously ill, and was out of action for seven weeks. It was a hugely expensive movie for those days that cost $6 million – about £30 million today – took nine months to make, attracted a vast amount of publicity and the critics loved it. ‘The film is absolutely superlative of its sort,’ reported the
Sunday Telegraph
, and the
New York Post
said, ‘The picture grips you with an astounding power.’ In London the
Evening News
said that ‘Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn give brilliant performances’, and the
New York Herald Tribune
thought David was ‘superb’.

Niv spent his weeks of convalescence at Château d’Oex. ‘He was very ill,’ Doreen Hawkins told me, ‘and we were terribly worried about him, but Hjördis wouldn’t have anything to do with him and moved into a separate room.’ When he had fully recovered he began to establish an alpine routine that he was to follow every winter for the rest of his life. He would rise early, do his daily exercises and drive the eight miles to Gstaad to ski with his instructor, François Masson, who was to become a good friend. He would lunch every day at the Eagle Club perched high on nearby Mount Wasserngrat, where he was soon elected onto the committee, or the Olden Hotel, where Mrs Donizetti painted a personal glass for him and hung it behind the bar. ‘Practically every day for years he had curried veal with rice and chutney,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he’d eat it every day for three months!’ After lunch he would ski again, or walk across country for several miles, and then drive home to Château d’Oex to change, and return to Gstaad or one of the nearby villages, Saanen or Rougemont, for a cocktail or dinner party, usually alone because Hjördis was drunk or could not be bothered. Mrs Donizetti
remembered that because he found himself driving several times a day to and from Gstaad he said, ‘Why did I ever buy a chalet in Château d’Oex? I must have been crazy.’ No, she told him, ‘it was because you were stingy about tax!’

‘Gstaad was a tiny community in those days,’ I was told by Taki Theodoracopulos,

There was, however, one woman in the area, another Swede, who liked Hjördis, maybe because she was very young and perhaps too naïve to understand what was going on: Sussie Kearley, the twenty-one-year-old wife of an American financier. She was twenty-two years younger than Hjördis and told me: ‘I don’t know why people didn’t like her. I loved her company and she was so amusing in the Swedish language. It was the sort of words she used – not slang but full of humour in the way she spoke.’

In Switzerland David started painting and collecting pictures again, and was about to buy an expensive Miró when the dealer remarked how amusing it was that six months
after painting it Miró had forgotten which way up it was meant to be. Niv was not amused at all. ‘If the artist didn’t know which way up his original idea should be, then I didn’t want to fork out my hard earned cash to buy it,’ he wrote in a letter to
The Times
twelve years later. ‘The picture, needless to say, was snapped up by someone else and now is valued at 10 times the original figure.’ Numerous readers replied and he wrote to the paper again to say that he had recently spent a whole day studying a Miró one-man exhibition at St Paul de Vence and ‘I still harbour a sneaking suspicion that he is frequently laughing at all of us.’

A cheaper addition to his household came onto the scene soon after he bought the chalet: an Italian called Bernardo turned up at the door, announced that he had come to work for him and became the Nivens’ resident butler/cook. ‘He wore a long, white, buttoned jacket to his knees, like those worn by milkers in a dairy,’ David Jr told me, ‘and Daddy found this so amusing that he bought several of them for him.’

Niv’s first job after his illness was to make an Italian multinational movie,
I Due Nemici
, which was filmed in Rome and the Israeli desert near Eilat, released in English as
The Best of Enemies
, and told of the constantly changing relationship between two officers in Ethiopia in 1941, one British, one Italian, who keep capturing each other. During shooting he was nearly shot himself when an Arab extra fired an old wartime rifle by mistake and the bullet missed his head by inches. While filming
The Best of Enemies
he was briefly reconciled to Trubshawe, who had once been the best of friends. Trubshawe was in the picture too, fell ill in the desert and Niv moved him into his own air-conditioned hotel room to recover. ‘But the friendship was really over,’ Trubshawe told Morley. ‘In the thirty years after the war I think he came down to lunch in Sussex maybe twice, bringing with him a bottle of whisky and a pot of caviar. There’d be a few brief reminiscences and then he’d be off back to London and that
was that. A few letters, more towards the end when he began to get ill, but no real contact. I think he began to regard me, probably rightly, as rather a dimwit who could only talk about the past and somehow he didn’t want to think about our past, only the Hollywood past which I hadn’t shared. I think our past meant Primmie and the war, and he really wanted to forget all of that: his was now a quite different life.’

On 18 March 1961 Niv’s stepfather, Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, died in hospital in London at the age of ninety-two.
The Times
and
Daily Telegraph
both printed brief obituaries and his lifelong fib about his age was so successful that both newspapers reported that he was only eighty-five. In a tribute in
The Times
his Turf Club friend Henry Maxwell, who the club barman Jimmy Holland told me was ‘a lovely man’, wrote of Comyn-Platt: ‘Of his qualities the one which I think was outstanding was his courage. Old age, infirmity when it came, enforced isolation, and physical suffering, he fought them step by step to the end.’ Niv did not go to the funeral, but Joyce and Grizel attended the memorial service at St James’s, Piccadilly, along with more than forty mourners, among them three earls, a countess, two knights, three titled ladies and two Queen’s Counsels, so ‘Uncle Tommy’ was not nearly as unpopular and unloved as Niv would have had us believe. He left a gross estate of £55,539 10s Od, which in modern terms would be worth about £777,000, an extremely respectable sum for a man who had lived for so long. Not a penny went to any of the Nivens: apart from two small £500 bequests the entire estate was left to a niece in Somerset, though it is possible that Niv, Joyce and Grizel did benefit financially from Sir Thomas’s death because under the terms of their mother’s will the income from her own estate should now have been passed on to them.