Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (9 page)

In the event he was allowed to take two months’ leave and it was late February before he sailed back to England on the German liner
Europa
, once again in a tiny cabin in the rumbling depths of the ship, vowing to return to America as soon as possible. He had glimpsed a way of life that seemed so much bigger and richer than the life he was leading in England in the HLI, and he knew now that it would be only a matter of time before he left the army and went back to North America for good. Not only had he had a wonderful long leave at very little expense to himself, he actually returned to England richer than he had been when he left because a generous American passenger on board the ship gave him a share in his daily sweepstake ticket and he won £160, about £5600 in modern terms.

He returned to barracks in Dover on 27 February 1933, by which time Trubshawe had left the regiment to marry Margie Macdougall. While David was away he had been promoted to full lieutenant, but the thought of serving more than twenty more years in the HLI without even Trubshawe to ease the boredom was inconceivable. Nor could he look forward to any further promotion, for unless there were a war soon it would be years before he would be elevated even to captain.

His sweepstake winnings allowed him to buy a sporty old Bentley – ‘the complete cad’s car’, he called it – and he saved money by sticking on his windscreen the label from a Guinness bottle, which looked just like a road tax disc. Several times a week he would escape from the barracks in Dover and drive up to London, to resume his friendship with Ann Todd, whose career as an actress was beginning to take off after making five films in two years. He became increasingly keen on her although she was less impressed by his need always to be in a crowd and to lead the rollicking sort of jolly macho life that he had with Trubshawe. She introduced him to a young actor called Laurence Olivier and for the first time he began to think seriously about becoming an actor himself. One evening he asked her advice. ‘I told him he couldn’t
possibly be an actor,’ she said to Morley. ‘I’d only ever seen him doing sketches in army concerts and although he was very funny it was always a turn, usually imitating somebody or pretending to skate. I didn’t see much sign of him being an actor, so I told him that in my view he was a “ha-ha-ho-ho” sort of person and that he should stick to the army because nobody would ever believe him on a stage. Even if he said, “I love you,” they would just laugh. I think that rather depressed him.’

Another of his girlfriends, a bubbly brunette called Priscilla Weigall, who had been voted Deb of the Year, disagreed, told David that he ought to become a movie actor and introduced him to the Hollywood film star Douglas Fairbanks Senior, who was living for a while in Hertfordshire. Fairbanks took to him immediately and they played golf together at Sunningdale, but Niv was too nervous and awed to ask his advice about becoming an actor, so Priscilla then introduced him to a film producer, Bunty Watts, who was making a film at Sound City, a small studio nearby. Watts took to Niv as well and gave him a part as an extra in the film,
All the Winners
, a thriller about blackmail and race-fixing in the horse-racing world in which David could be glimpsed among the crowd in a paddock at the races. He also tried to land a part in Alexander Korda’s epic
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, with Charles Laughton as the king, but had no luck. A film researcher has claimed that David also appeared as an extra in the 1932 film
There Goes the Bride
but there seems to be no other evidence for this.

One consolation that spring was the appointment of a new HLI Commanding Officer, Colonel Alec Telfer-Smollett, who was to become another of David’s father figures. Telfer-Smollett brought with him a brisk efficiency and commitment that revitalised the battalion, and Niv quickly came to admire him, and they became friends and often dined and played golf together. ‘He was a firm believer in an ancient concept of a regiment – that it should be a family,’ Niv wrote
in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, and a family was what he had sought and needed ever since his father had been killed.

That spring David met Uncle Tommy for the last time in his life. Comyn-Platt invited him to lunch at the Carlton Club but as soon as they met again for the first time in years except for his mother’s funeral, Niv claimed in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, Sir Thomas ‘rose from a chair, ignored my outstretched hand and said, “The solicitors tell me that, so far, you have paid nothing towards the grave.” I did not stay for luncheon and I never saw him again.’

David’s disillusionment with the army reached its peak when half his platoon was sent off to India to enjoy exotic Eastern adventures while he was despatched to Salisbury Plain to take a dreary course in machine-gunnery at Netheravon. Deeply fed up one day and raring to get back to the fleshpots of London, he claimed that he was listening to a lecture by a major-general who wound up his talk by asking ‘Any questions, gentlemen?’ and Niv raised his hand and asked, ‘Could you tell me the time, please? I have to catch a train.’ Apparently he was placed under close arrest and guarded in his room by another second lieutenant who was armed with a sword but let him escape through a window. Niv claimed in
The Moon’s a Balloon
that he drove fast up to London and had dinner at White’s Club with two ex-soldier friends, Victor Gordon-Lennox and Philip Astley, who urged him to resign from the army before he was arrested and court-martialled. Gordon-Lennox had recently married a Canadian and was about to sail for Canada and Washington to take up a new job there, said Niv, and in exchange for Niv’s Bentley he gave him a return ticket to Quebec and an invitation to stay with them for a week or two until he decided what to do with the rest of his life. It was there and then, said Niv, from the porter’s desk at White’s, that he sent Telfer-Smollett at the Citadel Barracks in Dover the legendary telegram that he had pinched from Max and that read: ‘
DEAR COLONEL REQUEST PERMISSION RESIGN COMMISSION LOVE NIVEN
.’ In
The Moon’s a
Balloon
he added, ‘I sailed for Canada in the morning.’

This was all untrue. In fact his departure from the army was neither sudden nor dramatic and took more than a month to arrange. Telfer-Smollett was not in Dover at all but on holiday in Scotland, and far from receiving a cheeky telegram he had already discussed the resignation with David, who had told him that he wanted to go to Hollywood to become an actor. Telfer-Smollett wrote worriedly to Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt on 4 August 1933:

Uncle Tommy wrote immediately to David, who was still in Dover, to urge him to think again, but David had made up his mind and replied on 3 September,

The third and fourth last lines of that letter – and Sir Thomas’s concern that he might be making a big mistake – suggest that they were on much better terms than Niv would have us believe. But Sir Thomas had finally had enough of this difficult stepson and forwarded the letter to Joyce with a pencilled note that read: ‘It would appear that both you and Smollett are
wrong
! It is Oil not Films! I don’t understand. Anyhow I have done my best; and now, as I say, I give it up. T.’

Telfer-Smollett’s letter disposes of another story about Niv’s
departure from the army that was quite untrue: many years later there were those (including his literary agent, George Greenfield) who believed that he had behaved so indiscreetly with the wife of a naval officer that he had been ordered to resign or be cashiered, but if that were so Telfer-Smollett would hardly have tried to persuade him to stay in the HLI. Nor would he have given Niv a regimental farewell dinner, which he did, at which Niv made a speech announcing that he was going to Hollywood to become a famous film star – a story that Greenfield was told by one of Niv’s contemporaries, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Percival DSO, who was at the dinner. The story about ‘the big oil people’ was obviously simply a fib to mollify Uncle Tommy.

To raise some money Niv sold to a London hospital the right to dissect his body after his death. They paid him £6 10s 0d for it, about £230 today, when he signed a promise that he would never smoke, and he sailed for Canada on the
Empress of Britain
on 6 September. For the rest of his life he liked to pretend that he became a film star only by amazing accident, but that was quite untrue. From the age of twenty-three he went after it with ruthless determination.

Four

A Swordsman in Hollywood
1933–1937

T
he Canadian autumn welcomed Niv to his new world with the red and gold of its maple trees, the stillness of its waters, the bracing chill of its clean air. He stayed for several days with Victor Gordon-Lennox, his wife Diana, and her parents, Admiral Charles and Lady Kingsmill, in a wooden guest cabin on the Kingsmills’ five-acre island in Lake Rideau halfway between Ottawa and Lake Ontario. They went fishing on the lake, made expeditions into the surrounding countryside and decided that for David to get to Hollywood he needed first to go to New York. In newspaper interviews years later he claimed that he had worked in Canada as a lumberjack and for a bridge-building gang for 18 cents an hour, but he made no mention of these jobs in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. He cashed in his return ticket to England and headed for New York but was struck down on the way, in Ottawa, by a very painful throat, had his tonsils removed, and to pay his hospital bill he copied four extracts from a book by Thyrett Drake,
Fox Hunting in Canada
, and sold them as his own work to a local newspaper. A few nights after leaving hospital he collapsed with a terrifying throat haemorrhage, nearly bled to death and had to be rushed back, gushing blood, for transfusions.

It was the middle of an icy October before he made it to New York by train. He took a tiny room in a cheap hotel, the Montclair on Lexington Avenue, and reported in
The Moon’s a Balloon
that he found through an agency a few jobs as a waiter at illegal cocktail parties. Many years later he claimed
that he had been so desperate for money that he had also worked as a delivery man for a Chinese laundry, but once again he made no mention of this in
The Moon’s a Balloon
. Jobs were not easy to find during the Great Depression, when millions were unemployed. ‘I saw people lying drunk in the streets,’ he told Michael Parkinson on TV in 1981. ‘The most awful thing was the marathon dancers. Pathetic. To pick up a first prize of $100 they’d dance for forty-eight hours, in each other’s arms, one sleeping while the other kept moving, like zombies. It was absolutely awful, and the spectators were absolute vultures.’ The Prohibition law had, however, recently been repealed after nearly fourteen dry years and David landed a job as a liquor salesman for 21 Brands, a wholesale company that was part of the 21 Club at 21 West 52nd Street where Charles Laughton, Mary Pickford, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway were regulars and where he had been a guest so often with Barbara Hutton and her rich friends a year earlier. The 21 was so exclusive that one of the regulars remarked ‘the food’s so good even the waiters eat it’ and the novelist Damon Runyon reported that ‘each guest had to present his bank book at the door to prove that he had a worthy balance’ and ‘the doorman looked him up in the social register before admitting him’.

David made his first sale for 21 Brands, a case of champagne, to Barbara Hutton’s rich cousin Woolworth Donahue, but first the FBI took his fingerprints and a mugshot that showed him with a numbered card round his neck, like a criminal – a photograph that hung for many years afterwards in the 21 Club with the caption ‘Our First and Worst Salesman’. They paid him $40 a week – about £8 then, or £280 a week today – but to justify that he needed to sell at least $400-worth of booze a week, and although he managed to keep the job for several months he hardly earned his keep, partly because he spent too much time hanging around the 21 Club itself or Rose’s bar and restaurant down the road, with Barbara Hutton and her rich friends; partly because he
could not bring himself to try to flog liquor to someone who had just bought him a drink or a meal. The area to which he was assigned, which included all the sleazy bars and dodgy restaurants to the west of Lexington between 42nd and 90th Streets, was already the rough territory of some frightening gangsters who made it plain that he was not welcome on their patch, and on one occasion he was the victim of a clever hijack: ‘I took a telephone order from one of the lusher night spots in Manhattan for fifty cases of champagne,’ he said. ‘I pulled up in a truck outside the place and several white-coated characters appeared, unloaded the cases on the sidewalk, and handed me a cheque. I drove happily away. It wasn’t until an hour later that I learned that no sooner had our truck moved off than another pulled up in the same spot, the cases were loaded aboard – and never seen again by my clients! And, of course, the cheque bounced.’

To improve his image he pretended that he was staying not at the crummy little Montclair Hotel but at the elegant Waldorf-Astoria nearby, which he would enter every morning through the back door and leave through the front door, nodding genially at the doorman, reversing the procedure each evening. As he strode confidently through the Waldorf in January 1934 he bumped into an old friend from England, Tommy Phipps, the brother of the twenty-three-year-old future actress and comedienne Joyce Grenfell, who invited him to spend the weekend at his mother’s and stepfather’s house in Connecticut. His stepfather was the champion American athlete and Hollywood actor ‘Lefty’ Flynn, who liked David immediately and introduced him to the New York hostess and social fixer Elsa Maxwell, who took an immediate shine to him as well and told him that he should do well in Hollywood as an actor ‘because nobody out there knows how to speak English except Ronald Colman’.

She was short, ugly, fat and fifty, but she invited him to a party for the German film director Ernst Lubitsch in the hope that Lubitsch might sign him up for a film. Lubitsch ignored
him. As his money ran out Niv left the hotel and rented a basement room on Second Avenue, but help seemed to be at hand when he met a fat little cowboy, Doug Hertz, in a bar on 58th Street in March and Hertz persuaded him to join him in setting up a venture to promote indoor novelty horse races during which the jockeys would have to ride several different ways in each race: in the saddle facing forward, then facing backwards, then side-saddle, then bareback, and then change to another horse without touching the ground. David thought it sounded great fun and maybe a money-spinner. He persuaded Lefty to join them, and Lefty and Elsa Maxwell canvassed friends to invest in the venture to buy ponies and hire a bunch of cowboys and Indians as jockeys. Damon Runyon bought $1000-worth of shares and they set up the American Pony Express Racing Association and launched their first novelty race night in May in front of 15,000 people in the municipal auditorium of Atlantic City, a raucous seaside pleasure resort a hundred miles south of New York. ‘I recall with a guilty shudder,’ said Niv later, ‘that I led the grand march billed as Captain David Niven of the Royal North West Mounted Police.’ The evening was a huge success – too much so for the local gangsters, who turned up the next day to demand a large share of the action, and when Hertz refused the mobsters put them out of business within a week. Once again David was broke but help suddenly arrived from a most unexpected quarter: Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt. In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv claimed that he received a letter from Grizel with some excellent news: ‘My mother, it appeared, had left everything to “Tommy” in trust for the four of us, but she had stipulated something very important. Max had once borrowed £300 from her to bail himself out of debt, so if either Joyce or Grizel or I were in desperate need, the small estate must try to provide the same amount for us. Within a week, I had collected my share. It came to a little over eight hundred dollars – I was rich.’

In fact Etta’s will had said nothing of the kind and had
stipulated that her children should inherit none of her money until Sir Thomas’s death, so if he agreed to give David cash at all out of the trust it was only because very generously he thought that was fair. But Max had borrowed £3000 not £300, so was it in fact £3000 that Niv was sent – the equivalent of about £100,000 today? If so, it was a stupendous windfall for a young man of twenty-four, and even if it was only £300 that was still £10,000 in modern terms and an astonishingly kind gesture by the much maligned Sir Thomas. If he also agreed to give similar amounts to Joyce and Grizel, which it sounds as if he did, his legacy from Etta would have been seriously diminished.

With a very nice nest-egg in the bank, Niv skipped off to Bermuda to enjoy an idyllic holiday with Lefty and his wife, Norah, in a small rented cottage in Devonshire Bay. For several weeks he swam, cycled, sailed, explored the island and revelled in the magic of the beaches, tranquil sea and glorious flowers, and he had a fling with an eighteen-year-old girl from Virginia. Tommy Phipps joined them after a trip to Hollywood and raved about the place, Lefty agreed and reminisced about his own days there as an actor, and one of Niv’s English friends, Dennis Smith-Bingham, wrote from Hollywood urging him to join him there and promising to find him somewhere to live.

‘I clearly remember David suddenly grabbing my arm, swinging me around and me thinking I had never seen him so intense,’ Phipps wrote for Peter Haining’s book fifty years later.

At the end of July Niv sailed aboard an old freighter to Cuba to catch the American liner
President Pierce
a week later as it steamed towards the Panama Canal, the Pacific Ocean and Los Angeles. Havana was a nervous, seedy city in pursuit of every kind of pleasure and perversion, and awash with booze, brothels, casinos, torture and murder, and seething with unrest following a coup the previous year against the brutal and corrupt President Gerardo Machado by the equally brutal and corrupt Colonel Fulgencio Batista, who was later to become President himself and not to be ousted by Fidel Castro for another twenty-five years. Niv loved the louche, twitchy atmosphere of Havana and drank every evening in Sloppy Joe’s bar with a dangerous Irishman who tried to persuade him to join a group of mercenaries who were planning to foment a rebellion against the government. When Niv signed his first Hollywood contract the following year, Sam Goldwyn’s publicity director livened up his fictional history by claiming that he had joined the rebels and was paid $400 a week to teach them how to use machine-guns, and the legend lived on for years, encouraged by Niv himself, who told the story again and again. But both his sons believed that it was untrue. ‘It was just a PR stunt,’ said David Jr; Jamie said, ‘He never talked about Cuba to me’ and Roddy Mann said, ‘Of course not. He made it up.’ What did perhaps happen in Cuba was that Niv was warned one night by a young man
from the British embassy – our man in Havana – that the police were watching him and that he had better get out of town as soon as possible. After that he kept away from Sloppy Joe’s and caught the
President Pierce
with relief two days later.

After sailing through the Panama Canal he was met when he arrived in Los Angeles by Dennis Smith-Bingham and Elizabeth Young, a sweet, beautiful twenty-four-year-old actress who had already appeared in more than fifty films under her screen name Sally Blane and whose mother had agreed to put Niv up in their pool house while he looked for somewhere to live. Reporters always met ocean-going liners in those days and as soon as they saw Sally with this unknown young Englishman they sniffed a story, and Niv was only too happy to oblige with another fib. Inspired by his pony-racing experiences in Atlantic City, he told them that he had come to California to buy more than a hundred polo ponies.

Many years later he was fantasising again when he told Lionel Crane of the
Sunday Pictorial
in 1957 that he had landed not in LA but in San Francisco, with just one suitcase, drunk and broke: ‘I don’t mean I was hard up, old boy. I mean broke, flat, stony. Not a bob. And I was wearing all I had – a dinner jacket.’ He went on to claim that he had thumbed a ride south towards Los Angeles on a fruit lorry as far as Santa Barbara, had spotted the British cruiser HMS
Norfolk
in the bay, had gone on board to meet some old friends, been invited by them to a party, and got drunk again. He said he had woken at sea, spotted the replica of an old-time sailing ship, the
Bounty
, to starboard, had been swung across to it on a rope still wearing his dinner jacket, and had discovered on board Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable actually making the movie
Mutiny on the Bounty
– and that, he said, was how he finally arrived in LA. It was absolute tosh but it made a vivid yarn and added to the Niven legend. As for his claim that he arrived with just one suitcase, Sally Blane told Sheridan Morley that Niv had so much luggage that it filled their hallway: ‘he seemed to have brought everything
he ever owned over from England’ and ‘we figured it was going to be quite a long stay’.

David was mesmerised by his first balmy glimpse of California as Sally drove him from the harbour at San Pedro into Los Angeles and past the bungalows of Hollywood and the sumptuous film star mansions of Beverly Hills. In those days Hollywood was just a village, the actors had as yet no reason to hide themselves away behind high walls with security men and dogs, and in a grocery or drug store you might well find yourself standing next to Clark Gable or Joan Crawford. For David this was Paradise: the wonderful climate, the open skies, the outdoor life, the palm trees, swimming pools, sailing boats, nightspots, the famous faces, the chance of making a fortune, the girls all stunningly beautiful, even the waitresses and hairdressers, each dreaming of becoming a star too.