Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (51 page)

By now
The Moon’s a Balloon
and
Bring on the Empty Horses
had sold more than 9 million copies between them and Israel was very keen for Niv to write another book for Putnam’s, but despite the change of regime there David was determined
to break free and told Greenfield to tell Israel that he considered himself released from their option clause because Mitchell Beazley had offered them the Hollywood coffee-table book for $500,000 and they had turned it down. Greenfield said he would never get away with such a transparent ploy since Niv had never even started work on the Hollywood book, so Niv wrote to Putnam’s himself – ‘the
foul
Putnams’ as he was still calling them unfairly – to say he was leaving whether they liked it or not, and on the same day he wrote to Vaughan at Doubleday to suggest that he should compile
The Great Book of Lies
for them, an anthology starting with Adam and ending with modern politicians. He was still trying to write 200 words of the novel every day ‘but all that happens is that I seem to re-write the same two hundred every other day!’ Given the unfair way he was treating the blameless new management at Putnam’s, it seems poetic justice that when his butler at Lo Scoglietto was offered more money by one of the neighbours he resorted to equally devious tactics to escape his contract with David: he bored a hole in the bottom of Hjördis’s teacup, she was drenched with hot tea and he was sacked.

Despite Niv’s fears that his acting career was over he was still being offered the occasional movie and flew to London in April to make
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
, in which he played the mastermind of a gang of bank robbers. In London he gave as always several newspaper interviews. ‘I get very depressed when I think of all my friends dying off,’ he told Dan Ehrlich of the
Daily Express
. ‘I guess my group has been called up.’ He even made a joke about the sudden loss of his healthy good looks, telling Margaret Hinxman of the
Daily Mail
that when he had walked recently into a London delicatessen a woman had asked if he was David Niven and when he admitted it had remarked, ‘Well, you’re not looking too good, are you?’

It was Kristina’s eighteenth birthday on 4 June 1979 and her parents gave her a pair of diamond earrings and a birthday
party at Lo Scoglietto to which they invited the Rainiers and their son Prince Albert. Jamie was also there with his two Fernandas and Eugenie, and during their holiday Niv took them out sailing, fishing, swimming and snorkelling every day in his new 22ft boat. The girls were now eight and six, and ‘one was the bosun and one the first mate, and they’d have to salute him’, said their mother. ‘We didn’t see him often but when we did he was so excited and really involved and gave a hundred per cent of his time.’ Fernanda Jr told me that they used to call Niv Grandfather-With-The-Moustache because their other grandpa was clean-shaven: ‘He was a great grandfather, great fun, but I don’t think Hjördis liked us particularly. She wasn’t a grandmother figure at all.’

Greenfield finally won the Battle of Putnam’s when he wrote to Israel to suggest that whatever the legal situation might be, ‘I take the view that divorce is rather like rape. One has to lie back with a good grace and, if not enjoy it, at least accept it.’ Israel replied with calm dignity to say that although Niv was treating him extremely unfairly ‘so be it, then. “Buggered”, however, would seem to me a more accurate word than “raped”.’ In fact he and Putnam’s were lucky to have lost David as an author because Doubleday were to make a huge loss by taking him on.

On 27 August 1979 Niv was shattered when he was watching the TV news and heard that his old wartime comrade Lord Mountbatten, who was seventy-nine, had been murdered by an IRA bomb while sailing near his Irish holiday home at County Sligo. ‘It was one of only two times that I saw Daddy cry,’ said Fiona. ‘The other was after Kristina’s accident. He was close to Mountbatten and Prince Philip and all the Royal Family, though I heard that my mother once slapped the Queen by mistake at a ball at Buckingham Palace when she was wearing a flowing gown, got up to dance, swung round and knocked into the Queen. My father enjoyed telling that story: he said they were never invited back!’ Niv wrote a letter of condolence to Prince Philip, who was
obviously a personal friend since he replied with a friendly but typically acid note from Balmoral that read: ‘Dear David, It was very kind of you to write at this time. One can only hope that this senseless act may help to galvanise politicians and churchmen into some useful activity. Yours ever, Philip.’ There were of course many politicians and churchmen who wondered what it would take to galvanise Prince Philip into some useful activity himself.

A few days later Niv returned to London for five weeks to make
Rough Cut
, an amusing caper in which he played a suave but dodgy Scotland Yard detective, but although the film earned him some good reviews he was annoyed that much of his performance was cut and he was given only third billing after Burt Reynolds and Lesley-Anne Down. He sued the producer, David Merrick, for $1,700,000 for breach of contract plus $91,667 in salary that he claimed he was still owed, plus interests and costs, but was to settle out of court eighteen months later for $125,000.

After shooting
Rough Cut
he flew to India – Delhi and then Goa – to make his last major movie,
The Sea Wolves
, with several ancient chums, among them sixty-six-year-old Trevor Howard, sixty-three-year-old Gregory Peck, fifty-seven-year-old Patrick Macnee and fifty-two-year-old Roger Moore. At first he turned the part down but when Peck insisted that he should be in the picture the producer, Euan Lloyd, raised his offer to $500,000 (£780,000 today) plus $1500-a-week (£2300) expenses and Niv could not resist the easy money. It was yet another war film, this time based on the factual story of a group of elderly Allied ex-soldiers who had hijacked an old rust bucket in Calcutta in 1943 to sail to neutral Portuguese Goa and blow up several German ships. ‘It was fun to make,’ Moore told me. ‘We were all mates, all English except for Greg Peck, and there was only one girl, Barbara Kellerman, and about fifteen miles of straight beach with a colony of hippies, a pharmacy where they sold heroin, and a German nudist camp with highly unattractive guys who
would walk down the beach with their dicks between their knees.’

Shooting in temperatures of up to 140° was exhausting and Niv became increasingly worried about his motor neurone symptoms – he had trouble lifting his heel – though he did not yet know what was causing them. In the film he looked tragically old and ill, and was reminded yet again that his generation was passing away when his old love Merle Oberon died of a stroke in Malibu on 23 November 1979, aged sixty-eight. And ‘David hated Goa,’ said Euan Lloyd. ‘He persuaded me to let him return to Europe for Christmas and I let him go on the understanding that he did not ski because the insurance company insisted on it. On Christmas Day I got a telex from him wishing us all a very merry Christmas, and there was a PS: “The hang-gliding is great.” ’

In India Niv had been struggling with the novel, writing slowly in pencil in school exercise books, but now he wrote in despair to Vaughan: ‘I badly need help with this mess that I’m getting myself into!… All of it, in my opinion, is totally worthless!’ He returned to Goa after Christmas and to strengthen his worrying leg muscles he walked for hours along the beach with Macnee every afternoon. ‘We walked eight miles a day for two months,’ said Macnee,

Niv and Macnee discovered that they had a special bond because Macnee’s thirty-one-year-old daughter had also nearly died and had to have four operations for a brain tumour, and Niv was deeply sympathetic. ‘He was always very kind and fantastically concerned for other people,’ I was told by John Standing, who had a small part in
The Sea Wolves
. ‘I was forty-six, having an affair with a beautiful American model and in a forlorn state, and he was so nice to me. He took me out to lunch and dinner, shared his car, and back in London the following year he took me to lunch in Chelsea and we got terribly pissed. He was a great bloke.’

During those long daily walks along the beach ‘he wasn’t at all frail,’ said Macnee. ‘Everyone gets sick in India, and he said that they had looked into his stomach and found a big black container of liquid which they had dispersed. Motor neurone disease doesn’t just come out of nowhere, and I’m convinced it was something he picked up in Goa. Bloody India!’ Certainly Niv looks extremely unwell in the movie, very thin and drawn with mournful, staring eyes, and during the last week of filming, in February, he told the movie’s publicity director Brian Doyle that he was ‘terrified’ because he would be seventy in a few days’ time. ‘
Seventy
!’ he said. ‘And frankly I’m scared. I don’t want to be old. I’ve always felt so young. And I want to
stay
young.’

In February he escaped at last from India. ‘That really is a foul place!!!’ he wrote to Phil Evans from Château d’Oex. ‘India was dreadful and I went from cement to the trots with the greatest regularity and while I was clutching hands around my intestines, other humans stretched out theirs begging me for money.’ He went skiing the same day but was appalled to find himself so breathless that he had to lie down and rest twice. He was also starting to worry about Fiona, who was now fifteen and beginning to flirt with teenage
freedom. ‘I was a good girl and never did anything naughty or took drugs,’ she said. ‘Kristina and I both smoked and Daddy didn’t like it at all because Mummy smoked like a fiend, but he didn’t try to stop us. He let me have the occasional glass of wine and although I wasn’t allowed to read
The Moon’s a Balloon
till I was older he was very open about sex and said, “If you have to have sex please be careful, and if you need me just let me know.” You could pretty much talk to him about anything, but I did once make him cross when I stayed out all night after being stuck in Gstaad in a snow storm. Daddy never slept until we got home, he just lay awake waiting for us to come back, and when I came home at eight o’clock, following the snow ploughs, that finger went up and that’s all I needed.’

When the Buckleys and Galbraiths were not in Switzerland life was sometimes boring. Hjördis had now completely stopped going anywhere with him – ‘you
never
saw them together,’ said Valerie Youmans – and Roddy Mann recalled that David was so desperate for company at Château d’Oex that he would invite the local Stationmaster up for drinks. The staff at the chalet were also decidedly weird. ‘Daddy hired one guy who used to wear little bobby pins in his orangey hair,’ said Fiona. ‘He always complained about his sciatic nerve, but when Daddy came down in the morning he would be down on his knees bowing to him. Another guy was a complete crook.’ Another couple who were employed that winter season of 1980 ‘were most strange’, Jamie told me. ‘Every other month the butler would change his name, nationality, and even his relationship with his wife: sometimes she was his wife, sometimes his mistress, sometimes the unknown person who worked in the kitchen. I’d ask François for a glass of wine and he would tell me that François was no longer there but that he, André, would be pleased to produce some! They were kept on only because it was very hard to find replacements in the middle of the season.’

For four years Jamie had been running a spaghetti sauce
company that he had bought in 1976 and finally sold in February 1980 at a profit of twenty-five per cent. ‘Daddy was very proud of Jamie for that,’ said Fiona, and Roger Moore told me: ‘He took
tremendous
joy in both his sons. Jamie made $7∙5 million (£9 million today) when he sold the sauce company and Niv was so
pleased
about it.’

On 1 March Niv was appalled to be seventy, but marked the birthday with a lunch at the Eagle Club to which he invited Evie and Leslie Bricusse, who told me: ‘He also invited ex-King Umberto of Italy. It was a weird group.’ Hjördis was not there.

Four days later Niv flew to Rome for an audience that Bill Buckley, a Roman Catholic, had arranged with Pope John Paul II, who had no idea that he was a film star but seemed to have a vague suspicion that he might have been a great personal chum of the previous Pope. In saintly mode Niv sent in April another £1000 each to Joyce and Grizel, whom he noted on his chequebook stub by her childhood nickname, Gump, and from now on she was always Gump on the stubs as though he were beginning to revert to childhood himself. Incredibly generous though he was towards his sisters, he could obviously afford it. ‘I used to advise him financially,’ Evan Galbraith said, ‘and he had $14 million (£17 million today), in gold bars in some Swiss bank.’ By the end of 1980 he had nearly six million Swiss francs invested in a Supplea Trust portfolio, his houses were increasingly valuable and stuffed with dozens of expensive works of art including a Picasso lithograph, two Miró gravures, three Ernsts, a Kandinsky and the Dali. The nine biggest pictures alone were valued by Sothebys at $916,800 (more than £1 million today) in April 1980, and he was about to sign a huge contract with Doubleday for two books. ‘David left most of his investments in our hands,’ said Jess Morgan, ‘but he was a very good investor himself, a big picture guy, and he did very well in gold. He encouraged us to buy gold for him in the 1970s when it was $35 an ounce, and after the US went off the gold standard it skyrocketed to a high of about $850
an ounce and David then sold very near the top. He had great connections in the financial world as well as his entertainment and social worlds.’