by Michael Munn
David lost his job selling liquor because of his poor sales figures, and he had to move out of his cheap hotel and into even cheaper lodgings, a basement room on Second Avenue. He wasn’t prepared to admit defeat just yet, and in March 1934, in a bar on 58th Street, he met a cowboy, Doug Hertz, who persuaded him to join him in an indoor novelty horse race venture. Lefty Flynn and Elsa Maxwell helped out, getting friends to invest in ponies and hiring cowboys to ride them. Writer Damon Runyon also got in on the act, buying $1,000 worth of shares in what became the American Pony Express Racing Association.
The grand opening was in May at the municipal auditorium of Atlantic City where 15,000 people came to bet on the ponies. Its success quickly came to the attention of the local Mafia who demanded a large share of the profits. Doug Hertz refused to pay up, and the mobsters closed the business down within days.
Broke again, David was saved by Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt who sent him a cheque for what might have been as much as $3,000. It was enough to send a happy David off on a holiday with Lefty and his wife Norah to Bermuda where David had a fling with an 18-year-old girl from Virginia.
In Bermuda, David listened in fascination as Lefty Flynn reminisced about his days in Hollywood. David’s dreams of movie stardom were further fuelled when he got a letter from an English friend, Dennis Smith-Bingham, who was now living in Los Angeles and urging David to join him out there. At the end of July, David set sail for Cuba and waited in Havana for a ship to take him through the Panama Canal and on to Los Angeles.
He claimed that while in Havana he met an Irishman in Sloppy Joe’s Bar who tried to persuade him to join a troop of mercenaries who planned to overthrow the Cuban government. In 1970 he said, ‘I became a Cuban rebel and because of my Army training I was able to train the rebels in the use of machine guns.’
Just five years later, unable to recall which version of events he had given me, he told a different story. ‘I used to drink every night in a bar called Sloppy Joe’s where I met a mad Irishman who was looking for mercenaries. I told him I wasn’t interested in getting myself killed. It turned out he was being watched, and then I discovered I was being watched also. I was warned by the British Embassy in Havana that the local police were watching me and it would be best if I got out of town. I couldn’t go anywhere because I had passage booked on a liner called the President Piece and there were still two days to go. So I steered clear of Sloppy Joe’s and was very relieved to get on board and sail on through the Panama Canal and on to Los Angeles.’
He told me that the story of him becoming a Cuban mercenary was made up by a publicist at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios and he liked the story so much he occasionally related it among his many other highly exaggerated tales. But I doubt either version was true. He just couldn’t resist adding colour to an already colourful life.
CHAPTER 7
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Hollywood
Upon his arrival in Los Angeles he was met by Dennis Smith-Bingham and a 24-year-old actress, Sally Blane, whose mother allowed David to stay in her guest house on Sunset Boulevard for a while. He was immediately struck by the sights of Los Angeles and the film star mansions of Beverly Hills, and he knew this was where he wanted to live and work.
Sally, whose real name was Elizabeth Young, had three sisters – 10-year-old Georgina, 21-year-old Gretchen, and 25-year-old Polly Ann Young who under her own name was a successful actress and had appeared in a number of films. The middle sister, Gretchen, was also a successful actress with the screen name of Loretta Young.
I became acquainted with Loretta through a series of transatlantic telephone conversations which began in 1974 (thanks to John Wayne who gave me her number when I worked on the film Brannigan – Loretta was Michael Wayne’s godmother). We hit it off and became friends – over the years, I took an interest in her many charities – which made it easy for me to talk to David about his relationship with her. On the set of Candleshoe at Pinewood Studios in England in 1976, he said,
I fell instantly in love with her. By the time she was 18, she’d already been married and divorced. There was a lot of competition for her and I didn’t stand a chance. She was seeing Spencer Tracy. Now Spence was a man of charm and wit and a good friend if he liked you, but when he was drunk he could be a dangerous enemy.
Unfortunately he didn’t like me, not at first, so we weren’t going to be good friends in a hurry. One evening he became quite drunk and was convinced I was flirting with Loretta – which I probably was. I’m a terrible flirt. I see a pretty girl and away I go, even if I don’t intend to actually follow it up.
He’d come over to collect her from her house, and she was with me in the house by the pool where I lived with all my worldly belongings which I carted from England to Canada to New York and finally to Hollywood. And they had grown on the way because you pick so much up, like presents from friends and odd souvenirs you simply can’t resist. Among these souvenirs was a war lance I’d been given in New York by an Indian who was one of the jockeys in our indoor horse racing business.
Spence didn’t like the way we were talking and laughing, or how she would hold my hand or pat it. I think I was in love with her, and when her eyes locked onto mine it was impossible for me to look away. Well, Spence had put away a few and although not blindly drunk, he was past the point of being polite. He picked up the lance and came at me with it. I ran outside with him in hot pursuit, and Loretta was yelling at him to stop being so damn silly. I tried to stand my ground for only a second, and as he came charging at me with the lance aimed right at me, I side stepped and he ran straight into the pool.
He disappeared under the surface. Loretta and I got on our hands and knees and peered into the water where we could see him but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to come up for air. ‘Maybe he’s drowned,’ I said.
Loretta said, ‘Do something.’
I said, ‘Like what?’
She said, ‘Jump in and save him.’
I said, ‘It might have slipped your mind but he was trying to kill me.’
She said, ‘You can’t just let him drown.’
I said, ‘Oh, very well,’ and I took off my shoes and was about to take off my trousers when he gently bobbed to the surface like a buoy, blinked several times and then blew out a spout of water from his mouth and began laughing.
Of course, Loretta was very relieved, and I was delighted I didn’t have to dive in after him as I was convinced he would just try and pull me under with him and we’d both drown. He climbed out of the pool and also managed to retrieve the lance, and when he stood up, he held it out to me and said, ‘This is yours, I believe. You really must be more careful with that, it could hurt someone.’
After that I avoided being alone with Loretta for a long time in case he came back. But I needn’t have worried. Their affair didn’t last long, and the next year she was involved with Clark Gable.
Now Gable was the most handsome man in Hollywood, and so I knew I had no chance against him, and so I gave up on Loretta. Fortunately there were hundreds of young starlets and would be starlets around and I was never at a loss for female company.
In 1979 I told David I was going to be speaking to Loretta, primarily for a tribute I was writing about John Wayne who had just died, and he said, ‘Give her all my love,’ so I did, to which she replied, ‘David’s one of my oldest and dearest friends. I knew him when he first came out to Hollywood. He came to stay with me and my family. I think he was rather overwhelmed by it all. He was like a little boy with eyes like saucers.’
‘Because of the girls?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, them too, but I mean the sights and sounds of Hollywood. It was a wonderful place back then, like a small community. Not sprawling and overgrown and overcrowded like it is today. The air was clean, the sun was warm and shone virtually all day, every day, and he thought it was like a playground.’
When I spoke to Loretta after David died in 1983, she said,
He was very serious about becoming an actor.
None of us knew if he could act or not, but he was very handsome, very well built and he had that wonderful Niven charm. But you never know if all that is enough until you get before a camera. He told me he was desperate to try acting and wanted to get into a studio, so I took him with me to Twentieth Century-Fox where I was filming [The White Parade]. He had to get down on the floor of my car and I covered him with a blanket so I could get him through the gate. He came to my dressing room and watched me being made-up. He kept saying to me, ‘You don’t need make-up. You’re perfectly beautiful as you are.’ I told him everyone needed make-up for the camera. He didn’t understand that and said, ‘The camera obviously doesn’t recognise perfection when it sees it.’ It was that Niven charm. But he was sincere, it wasn’t just flattery.
I told her, ‘He said he was quite in love with you.’
‘Oh yes. Well, we did enjoy some time together. He was very attractive and very funny which girls can’t resist. He had a lot of girlfriends, and he was so charming that people just took to him. We had a lot of movie actors come to our house and they were intrigued by this young Englishman, and before they knew it he was telling them funny stories and making friends. That’s a special gift.’
I told her that David had said that he often went with her and her sister Sally to various nightspots such as the Coconut Grove, the King’s Club and the Clover Club. Loretta recalled, ‘He’d go with us but usually ended up with some beautiful girl he’d spotted, and so we’d go home without him.’
I told her that in the years I’d known David I had discovered that sometimes his cheerful demeanour disguised a certain amount of insecurity and even depression.
‘I think you’re right,’ she said, and added,
He was very anxious when I first knew him. He was quite nervous and twitchy, especially when he met people for the first time, and he overcame that by being so funny. He was very affected by not having his father in his life. He always wanted to have a father. When he was a child he thought his mother didn’t love him. He had a sister he adored, Grizel, and another sister and a brother, but he hardly saw them, hardly knew them. He said he never had a family life and was very insecure. But he became very independent quite young.
Coming out to Hollywood all by himself was a remarkable demonstration of his strong sense of independence. He was quite anxious, quite nervous, but he made himself do all those things like coming to a foreign country and trying to get into pictures which thousands of people tried to do every day. I think he didn’t really have a clue how difficult it could be to get into pictures, so he had the benefit of ignorance and youthful ambition on his side.
I never tried to dissuade him from becoming an actor but I told him to be prepared for a difficult time. I knew that if the camera liked him then he had a good chance. He just needed the opportunity.
I wondered if he’d ever asked her directly for help in becoming an actor, to which she replied, ‘No, he never asked. I think he might have felt that living with us he might get to meet the right people. We must have been a useful family for him to settle in with,’ she laughed.
I asked her if she felt that he adopted himself into her family.
‘Oh yes. He did. I could tell he wanted to be a part of our family. My mother began to wonder when he was going to go because she said he could only stay a week or two until he found somewhere to live, but he arrived with tons of baggage and he settled very quickly and was in no hurry to leave. My sisters and I liked having him there.’
After living rent-free with Loretta’s family for six weeks, he realised he was outwearing his welcome, so he looked for somewhere else to live. He told me, ‘I thought I’d try my luck at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. It turned out to be half empty, so I thought I’d see if I could persuade the manager, a nice chap called Alvin C. Weingand who later became a Congressman, if he would let me have a room for $65 a month and defer all my rent until I got a job. Of course, I told him I was expecting to get work any day, and he agreed.’
David often played cards with Alvin Weingand who knew just about everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, and so through him and Loretta as well as Sally Blane, he soon got to know a number of important actors in Hollywood. He also became reacquainted with Douglas Fairbanks and often played tennis and golf with him.
David admitted to me, ‘I thought these people, when they became my friends, would easily get me into the movies. There was Charlie Chaplin and Ronnie Colman, all eager to give me advice, but none of them offered me any help, and I can see why. I had no background in the theatre which they all had. They had worked hard to get where they were and I was trying to just jump in and hope to land on my feet.’
Laurence Olivier, another British actor arriving in Hollywood at that time to make his first Shakespeare film, As You Like It, saw through Niven straight away. ‘He was always trying to be liked. Well, I understand that. So did I. So does every actor. But he was an expert at it because he entertained people with silly stories that had people in stitches. But that was going to wear thin eventually.’
Deciding he might find his way into movies by becoming an extra, David tried to sign on at the Central Casting Office but was turned away because he didn’t have a work permit.
He had once met the sister of Fred Astaire, Adèle, in London, so he took a chance and called at Astaire’s home after playing tennis nearby.
‘Fred and [his wife] Phyllis were probably my dearest friends when I first got to Hollywood,’ David said. ‘But I failed to make a good first impression when I turned up at their house without my shirt on and all hot and sweaty from a game of tennis. Phyllis answered the door and I started to explain that I knew Fred’s sister, and she just shut the door and I heard her cry, “Fred, there’s a dreadful man at the door with no shirt on who says he knows your sister.”
‘Fred came to the door, invited me in, we had a few drinks and chatted, Phyllis changed her mind about me and I stayed all day. We always remained especially close.’
David admitted to me, ‘I made as many contacts as I could because I’d learned years before that it’s not what you know but who you know, and I needed to know as many people as possible in Hollywood. So I ingratiated myself. I played cricket every Sunday with the British contingent and that way I got to know some marvellous character actors like Cedric Hardwicke and C. Aubrey Smith, and they had as many good stories to tell as I did, but because I was young they indulged me. I was just a kid to them, and they took a liking to me.’
He also made sure he got to know, and be liked by, stars like Cary Grant and Henry Fonda. He also played golf with Jean Harlow and her fiancé William Powell. ‘It was important to let them win,’ he told me.
Despite all these Hollywood stars who liked him, few of them were actively helping him break into movies. His break came through a series of events started, not by anyone in Hollywood, but an old Naval friend of David’s.
It began on a weekend he spent in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, with a girl he had met in New York, Lydia Macy. From the window of the cheap room in the hotel where they were staying, David saw a sight that took his breath away. He recalled,
In the bay was HMS Norfolk, a battleship which had been in Malta, and I wanted to pay her a visit. By a happy coincidence the ship’s officers were throwing a party and all of Montecito was invited, so that night in a rather frayed dinner jacket – the only one I owned – I escorted Lydia on board Norfolk. By good fortune, among the officers was a friend of mine, Anthony Pleydell-Bouverie who was flag lieutenant to Admiral Sir Ernle Erle Drax who was also on board. Then I saw other officers I knew, and poor Lydia ended up leaving the ship at the end of the party on her own while I stayed the night.
The next day I was invited to have lunch with the Admiral, and just as we were finishing a message was brought to the Admiral that HMS Bounty was off the starboard bow. And sure enough, when I looked out of the port-hole, there was a beautiful re-creation of the Bounty, the ship on which Fletcher Christian had led
the famous mutiny against Captain Bligh.
Anthony told me that the ship was there as a publicity stunt for Mutiny on the Bounty which was going to be filmed. This beautiful ship had been built at great cost to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and they were looking to get as much advance publicity as possible, so there were scores of Hollywood reporters and photographers on a tender alongside of the Bounty. Anthony knew that I wanted to be an actor, so he and the Admiral had decided that I should gatecrash the Bounty.
I was still in my frayed dinner jacket and rather shabby trousers because I had no other clothing to change into, and I climbed down a rope ladder over the side and onto the tender with all the press watching and wondering who this gatecrasher from a battleship was.
I was welcomed onto the tender by the film’s director, Frank Lloyd, and the stars Clark Gable and Charles Laughton. Robert Montgomery, who was a bigger star than Gable at that time, was along for the ride. Bob Montgomery and I got along like a house on fire, and Frank Lloyd was very hospitable indeed. I must have made an impression upon him because he suggested he meet me later back at the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
We arrived at San Pedro where Bob had his car waiting, and we arrived at MGM in the early evening just as filming was winding down for the day. I went to Frank Lloyd’s office and there met another great director, Edmund Goulding, who was very amused by the story Frank told of my arrival on the Bounty.
He said, ‘Ever done any acting?’
I said, ‘None to speak of,’ and he said, ‘Good. I’m looking for a new face to play the drunken, dissolute, younger brother of Ruth Chatterton in my next film. Come and make a test for me tomorrow.’ I told him that I didn’t have a work permit, and he said, ‘You don’t need a permit to make a test, and if it works out, the studio will arrange everything.’
I asked what he expected me to do for the test, and he said, ‘Just be yourself.’ Then he invited me to have dinner at his house with him and his wife, Marjorie Moss, who was a famous dancer, and then he insisted I stay the night. I wanted to go home and change my clothes, but he said, ‘I want you to make the test in that dinner jacket.’ I obviously looked suitably drunken and dissolute in it.
