Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (40 page)

Niv ‘was very good and very funny in
Lady L
,’ said Ustinov. ‘He played himself in every film, but because he was a man of many facets he could play a crook quite easily because the same qualities went into deceiving people as to charming them. There’s really no difference. He was highly intelligent and understood very quickly what you were up to. I asked him to do impossible things in
Lady L
, for an ordinary British actor, like having Burmese servants and saying, “Tung hak tung tun hai you-ho?” but he did it with absolute conviction. Nobody knew whether it was Burmese or not but it sounded pretty authentic.’ Niv liked to give the impression that acting was terribly easy and almost a despicable way for a grown man to make a living. ‘They all do that,’ said Ustinov. ‘All these actors, Paul Newman, people like that, are
embarrassed
by their success and the enormous amount of money they can make. To act well is difficult but it is
intrinsically
much easier than writing, for instance. There are very good actors who give you
exactly
what they rehearsed, and there are better actors who keep fresh enough in order to give you the impression it has never happened before or even been rehearsed before, and David was like that, fresh and spontaneous even on the fortieth take.’

At the end of May 1964 Niv was driving through the St Bernard tunnel in Switzerland when he spotted a pedestrian in the gloom, swerved to avoid him, crashed and inflamed his old wartime back injury. He was flown in agony to London to see his osteopath, whose treatment was so successful that two weeks later he was best man in Geneva when fifty-one-year-old Stewart Granger married his third bride, a luscious twenty-three-year-old Belgian beauty queen, Viviane Lecerf, and able to bend over to help with the exchange of wedding rings. He spent the rest of the summer at Lo Scoglietto, where
David Jr and Jamie joined the family for a holiday, and he learned to be a father again with his tiny new daughter, Fiona. Now older, richer, more relaxed and secure, and working much less, he was to be a much better father to the girls than he had been with the boys. ‘Dad loved the girls and they gave him a whole new lease of life,’ David Jr told me, ‘and he treated all of us equally.’ Hjördis ‘adored the girls too’, Doreen Hawkins told me, ‘but she treated them a bit like dolls. As they grew up they were dressed up to the nines in the best French clothes.’

That summer Niv was able to rediscover his sons when Hjördis and the nanny took the girls up to Château d’Oex in August to escape the ferocious heat of Cap Ferrat. David Jr was now working in William Morris’s office in New York and would soon spend two years at their branch in Rome, and Jamie, now eighteen, had decided he would rather go to Harvard than to Cambridge and had been offered a place there to read history and economics. Because he had three good English A-levels already, Harvard let him take his degree in three years instead of four, but Niv ‘had hardly a word of congratulation’, Jamie said. ‘He expected his children to do their best; nothing less was acceptable.’ Niv’s attitude hurt Jamie because he never went to see him in all his three years at Harvard. ‘He’d always tell people that I was there,’ said Jamie, ‘but when I asked him later why he never came he couldn’t answer me. It still bothers me today. I shouldn’t even talk about it because it’s a long time ago, but at times he wasn’t that great a father. He was very busy making one movie after another, and very interested in making money, and he was a sole parent and had been brought up by a single parent, and looking back I think that made a huge difference. Had he been brought up by two parents I think he would have had a different attitude about how he handled his children.’

Early in September 1964 Niv flew to New York to play yet another gentleman crook when he joined Charles Boyer,
Robert Coote, Gladys Cooper and Gig Young in launching a new Four Star TV series that was to become hugely popular,
The Rogues
, in which they played members of an international family of conmen who prey on the rich all over the world. The first episode was set on the French Riviera but Niv appeared in six more over the next seven months that were set in places as far-flung as London and Rio with actors as varied as Larry Hagman, Sally Kellerman, George Sanders, Telly Savalas and Walter Matthau.

In November he flew to Beirut to shoot the Lebanese scenes for
Where the Spies Are
and was nearly killed by an Arab when a huge crowd turned out to watch the filming, armed riot police were called out, shots were fired and someone hurled a rock which just missed his head. ‘It’s the first time that I’ve ever been stoned,’ he told the
Daily Sketch
. That Christmas Noël Coward and his retinue came over to Château d’Oex as usual on Boxing Day and Coward wrote in his diary: ‘Everybody kissed everybody else, exchanged presents, drank too much and ate too much and it was also lovely. We played games and giggled and David was dearer than ever. The snow lay all about, deep and uncrisp and uneven. Hjördis, the two boys and the two little adopted girls were enchanting and we staggered off the train at Les Avants giggling like idiots and feeling fine.’ Now and then Hjördis could still make an effort for the right people.

Another old friend arrived for New Year’s Eve: Natalie Wood, whose life at the age of twenty-six had become an emotional mess since she and R. J. had divorced two-and-a-half years previously. Since then she had lived with Warren Beatty, had flings with several men including Tom Courtenay and Frank Sinatra, and although she had had great successes in
West Side Story, Gypsy
and
Love With a Proper Stranger
she had tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills a month earlier after bumping into R. J., whose second wife had just given birth to his daughter. Now Natalie was having a fling with David Jr, who was four years younger but whose
reputation in the bedroom at the age of twenty-two was beginning to rival his father’s. ‘David and David Jr once challenged each other as to how many women they could have,’ Ken Annakin told me, and although David Jr denied this, other friends believed it was true. It must have been a nerve-racking visit for Niv since Natalie was still obsessed by R. J. and constantly on the telephone to her Californian shrink, who was not too keen on David Jr as psychiatric therapy. He did not last long and she went on to audition an entire cast of English actors – Michael Caine, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Richard Johnson-before marrying the British agent Richard Gregson in 1969.

Three new friends who were to become close came into Niv’s life in Switzerland that winter when he met the fifty-seven-year-old American economist, author and ex-US ambassador to India, J. K. Galbraith, who had a house in Gstaad. The Galbraiths introduced him to the influential thirty-nine-year-old American conservative thinker, columnist,
National Review
editor, TV talk-show host and novelist William F. Buckley Jr, who was about to run for Mayor of New York and had rented a house in Gstaad for a few weeks. Niv was to build strong friendships with Buckley and his wife Pat, another woman who liked Hjördis until she discovered how horrible she could be to Niv in private. ‘He was my best friend,’ Pat Buckley told me, ‘and I still miss him,’ before refusing to say any more because she was so upset to think of him even nineteen years after his death.

‘David and my wife had a tremendous attraction to each other,’ Bill Buckley, now seventy-five, told me at his house in New York, ‘and at the end of his life he wrote to her to say she was his closest friend on earth. He was witty and a wonderful, wonderful friend, and there wasn’t a negative aspect to him.’ The following year the Buckleys began renting a château at Rougemont, near Château d’Oex, where they would spend six weeks each winter for the next twenty-seven years while Buckley worked on his latest book, and Niv often
joined him to ski, lunch and paint. ‘Between 1965 and 1970 I must have seen him five hundred times,’ said Buckley. ‘He was quite a good painter and conscientious – I’m abominable – and there was a very nice painting that he did which reflected his melancholy: he kept changing the shade of the colours above the Swiss mountain that he was doing and it turned darker as he worked on it, feeling wretched. He was very proud of the fact that he had the same eight brushes that he had had since he took up painting years before in Hollywood. He washed them fastidiously in just the right temperature of water and stored them very neatly. His paintings are mostly country scenes in oils with very few human beings.’ In later years the Buckleys also visited Lo Scoglietto. ‘I was at the helm of his little boat one day,’ said Buckley, ‘and there was this huge 400ft yacht that was owned by a rich Brit called Guinness, and we were coming up to say hello and there was a wind shift and I tapped the belly of the boat, and out of the window right above sprang the head of Truman Capote. This delighted David and we used to joke that if you hit the Guinness boat just right Truman Capote would pop out!’

If it seems unlikely that Niv could have become so close to such political intellectuals as Buckley and Galbraith, Buckley explained, ‘No, he wasn’t an intellectual but he was thoughtful, serious, and a very good listener, a sort of inertial liberal who would have said he was a Democrat if he’d had to fill out a form.’ He was also ‘amusing, sensible and highly literate’, Galbraith said at his home in Boston, ‘and one of my most cherished friends. He never bored you, he entertained you.’ As for Hjördis, Buckley said she was still ‘good company. She smiled, laughed and enjoyed everything, and was very coquettish.’ It all depended on who you were.

According to Buckley David did not drink a great deal – ‘never more than two glasses of “shampoo” ’ – but other friends disagreed. ‘He drank a huge amount,’ said Roddy Mann. ‘He could put away more booze than anybody I’ve seen. Niven, Bob Wagner, Natalie and I once sat in a little
bistro in Villefranche and afterwards I counted fifteen empty bottles. He loved it, but never got drunk and was always jolly. He had a theory that if you drank as much water as wine you would never get pissed. In London we had late-night drinking sessions in a lot of little trats in Soho. We used to sit and drink ourselves stupid.’ In the pool house changing room at Lo Scoglietto there was a sign that read ‘if one night we all get very merry and beg you to stay over for a few days – we don’t really mean it’, and even towards the end of his life Niv admitted in an interview that he was still drinking two bottles of wine a day, which some modern doctors will suggest is enough to make you an alcoholic. Certainly he was seriously hung-over one Monday morning towards the end of January 1965 when he was still filming
Lady L
in Paris. Peter Lennon interviewed him for the
Observer
, and Niv confessed that he had just enjoyed a seriously boozy weekend, and a week earlier he had told James Green of the
Evening News
that after lunch he always slept for an hour in his dressing room. He also told Green that in the coming year Four Star would be producing forty one-hour episodes each of
Burke’s Law
and
The Rogues
, in total ‘the equivalent of sixty-two feature films – a figure worth noting since MGM at their peak produced around fifty films a year’. He reported that the company was now worth $11 million, so it was no wonder that he started referring to the money he was earning from it as ‘The Fortune’.

When he finished
Lady L
at the end of March he began to toy with the idea of transmuting some of his golden hoard of anecdotes into a collection of short stories. Friends, especially Roddy Mann, had been telling him for ages that he ought to publish them. ‘Noël Coward told me that David was the greatest raconteur he’d ever heard,’ Mann told me, ‘and he
was
. I would sit with him, pissing myself with laughter, as everybody else was, while he told a story, and then I’d think “wait a minute: I was
there
and it wasn’t
that
funny”, and then I realised how he was able to take
nothing
and make it wonderful.’ Niv wrote to his old friend Jamie Hamilton, the
boss of the publishers Hamish Hamilton, to ask his advice. ‘As you know, I am a frustrated writer,’ he wrote. ‘I loathe autobiographies by actors – particularly movie actors. But do you think there is any market for a book of short stories, each one autobiographical – so that one can capture the high and low lights without all that smug self-satisfaction in between? If you encourage me … I’ll start –
slowly
. And of course you get first hack at the result.’ Hamilton was enthusiastic but remembered that Niv’s first book,
Round the Rugged Rocks
, had been published by the Cresset Press, so they probably had a legal option to publish his next book, and asked him to clarify the situation.
The Moon’s a Balloon
had been conceived – as fiction, a collection of autobiographical short stories.

Back at Lo Scoglietto in the spring, Niv gave the British journalist Mike Tomkies an insight into the way he intended to raise four-year-old Kristina and two-year-old Fiona: TV for no more than an hour a day and lots of advice never to become actresses ‘because if you are lucky enough to be at or near the top, it’s a marvellous existence, but if you’re not, it is terrifying because by the time you realize you’re not going to get there, it’s too late to do anything else’. Kristina was already going to a nursery school in London when they were there and was about to be sent to the Swiss village school at Château d’Oex each winter and a French school near Lo Scoglietto each summer, ‘and when we go to California,’ said Niv, ‘she will go to a local school, too. Going to four different schools is terribly good for a child, if the schools are good ones. We cart them round wherever we go, none of that leaving them home with a nurse.’ With such nomadic childhoods it is surprising that neither girl became an alcoholic, drug addict or criminal, though several of Niv’s friends told me that they were difficult girls to raise but probably only because Hjördis was an alcoholic. Niv confessed that Hjördis was as ‘moody as hell, of course, as all Scandinavians are. The black moods come on and I go to hide in the cellar for a couple of days.’