David Niven

by Michael Munn

  There were two other actors also being tested, Ray Milland and Fred MacMurray. Milland was another British actor in Hollywood, having made steady progress since arriving there in 1930.

  I interviewed Milland in 1980 in London. He remembered David Niven’s early days in Hollywood. ‘He was without any acting ability and I think he knew it. He was always ready with a funny anecdote but in front of a camera he dried. I don’t think it had dawned on him at first that there would be other actors from Britain; maybe he thought he would be the next Ronald Colman. In fact he became very friendly with Colman, but he was nervous and I think jealous with other British actors in Hollywood and with a background in stage and British films. I wasn’t around him very much, but when I was I felt that he was giving me the cold shoulder. If you weren’t a big star, he didn’t want to know you.’

  It didn’t help Niven’s confidence when both Milland and MacMurray got the parts they tested for and a contract at Paramount while David was shown the door. Shortly after that, he was signed to a contract by Samuel Goldwyn, one of the most powerful independent producers in Hollywood.

  The story of how David came to be signed by Goldwyn is almost apocryphal. David always said that Thalberg decided to give him a tiny part in Mutiny on the Bounty, playing one of the mutineers, but there is no evidence he appeared in the film. A rumour spread that Thalberg was about to put David Niven under contract to MGM, which created sudden interest from other studios. If there was a rumour, I suspect that David started it. The rumour got Samuel Goldwyn’s interest and he signed David before anyone else could. That was Niven’s version of events.

  Another account that I read said Goulding persuaded Goldwyn to take a look at David’s one and only screen test and Goldwyn decided that was enough to sign him up. But the screen test, by David’s own admission, was pretty awful.

  I asked Loretta Young if she knew what happened, and she said she did. She told me that her mother advised David to play tennis regularly with Frances Goldwyn, Sam Goldwyn’s wife. Loretta’s mother knew that Frances would immediately like David, and she persuaded her husband to give David a break.

  David once said to me, ‘I suppose I got signed because Frances Goldwyn liked me.’ He had got his start in movies because Sam Goldwyn was just pleasing his wife.

  David might well have been considered by Thalberg. Niven told me, ‘I was good friends with Irving Thalberg. He said to me once, “I could have done better things for you than Goldwyn.” I had to tell him, “Then why didn’t you say something before I signed with Goldwyn?” He said, “I would have but you rushed into that contract while I was producing Mutiny on the Bounty, but I would have got around to it. Tell you what, when your seven years with Sam is up, I’ll sign you.” By the time my seven years were up, Irving had died.’

  It was late February 1935 when Goldwyn signed David to a seven-year contract, starting at $125 a week, a fortune to David back then. His salary would increase to $150, then to $200 in the third year, and then by a hundred each year until he was earning $600 in the seventh year.

  For the rest of his life, David had very mixed feelings about Goldwyn. He told me, ‘Without Goldwyn, I might never have made it. Or that’s what he wanted me to believe. I think it’s possible that I could have done better at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But I did have a career, and I suppose I should be thankful to Goldwyn for that. He could be very kind, and sometimes he was very generous, but then he made a lot of money by loaning me out to other studios. I remember when I told Ronnie Colman I was going to work for Goldwyn. Ronnie was just leaving Goldwyn, and he was horrified. He told me that Goldwyn was by far the best producer in Hollywood, but he could be a real bastard. Well, he was a bastard at times. But maybe you have to be a bastard to be a successful producer in Hollywood.’

  Whatever kind of man Goldwyn was, he got David started in movies. That’s a lot more than most other extras in movies ever got.

  CHAPTER 9

  —

  A Great Big Star

  David was able to afford to pay Al Weingand his bill and then move into a small house on North Vista. He told me that he was so overjoyed at his new-found wealth that he rushed out and bought a car for $500, only then to discover that his contract allowed Goldwyn to lay him off unpaid for 12 weeks every year, and that his annual 12 weeks unpaid layoff had started with immediate effect. So he had to return his car.

  I wasn’t totally convinced about this so I mentioned this tale of David’s misfortune to Joseph Cotten when I interviewed him in London in 1980; Cotten had been under exclusive contract to David Selznick, another of Hollywood’s powerful independent producers, and he said, ‘I think Niven has spent his life thinking up things he can say about Sam Goldwyn. It’s all garbage! An unpaid layoff was never a part of any contract from a major independent or studio. Men like Goldwyn and Selznick survived by loaning out their stars for considerable amounts of money and they couldn’t afford for a studio to ask for a contract player only to be told, “I’m sorry but he’s on a 10 or 12 week layoff and can’t work.”

  ‘You were employed by the studio, and you negotiated when you could have time off, all paid for at your usual weekly rate. No, I’m sorry, David Niven was never put on an immediate layoff. I knew Sam Goldwyn. He was a very good, very shrewd producer. He would have been wanting to loan Niven out and make some money from him from the moment he signed him.’

  David often made out that Goldwyn was a cruel tyrant, telling me in 1970, ‘Goldwyn told me he wouldn’t be looking for work for me and I had to find it myself. So I put the word about that I was under contract to Goldwyn and waited for the offers to trickle in.’

  But Goldwyn was finding David work, at Paramount, in Without Regret. Elissa Landi was the star, playing a woman who escapes from bandits in China and unwittingly becomes a bigamist. Goldwyn secured David sixth place in the billing, despite the fact that he delivered only one line, ‘Goodbye, my dear.’

  It was about this time Merle Oberon arrived in Hollywood. She had become the biggest female movie star in Britain and was under contract to Alexander Korda, the Hungarian born British based film producer who was very powerful in the British film industry. In 1935 Goldwyn bought a share of her contract from Korda to star her in American films, and so Merle arrived in Hollywood to star in The Dark Angel.

  David’s affair with Oberon continued in the US but Niven never spoke publicly of this throughout his life. When he wrote about it in The Moon’s a Balloon he tried to disguise her identity by referring to her as a ‘Great Big Star’. But it was an open secret in Hollywood. Laurence Olivier had seen the romance kindle just a few years before in London. ‘By the time I arrived in Hollywood,’ he told me, ‘Merle and David were very much in love. He’d changed a great deal since I first saw them together. She was obviously a big help to him professionally, teaching him how to behave with more confidence for the camera, and she was able to get him to deliver his natural charm for the camera. He was likeable and natural on screen, which is as much as any successful screen actor needed to be.’

  David and Merle spent weekends up at San Ysidro, a ranch owned by Ronald Colman and Al Weingand near Santa Barbara, where many friends of Colman and Weingand carried out their secret rendezvous. There Merle coached David for the camera and then persuaded Goldwyn to use him in Barbary Coast. He didn’t get billing at all, but as a Cockney sailor thrown out of a San Francisco brothel during the gold rush of 1850, he delivered one line as he was being pushed out of a window. Nobody heard what he said as his line was lost amid the general noise of the scene but David said that his line was, ‘Orl rite – I’ll go.’

  Merle’s private coaching paid off when he was tested for a small speaking role in A Feather in Her Hat and got the part. Goldwyn would have collected a good fee from Columbia for the loan of Niven for this film, and David would have received his usual hundred dollars a week salary. At this stage of his career David didn’t care too much, or even think a great deal, about how Goldwyn made money from loaning hi
m out. All he cared about was actually getting a part where he had a scene in which he was the centre of attention as a witty poet enlivening a literary party.

  The film featured a British actress, Wendy Barrie, who would later become one of gangster Benny ‘Bugsy’ Siegel’s girlfriends. David took her dancing a number of times; she was just one of numerous actresses and starlets he went dancing with. In 1975, when he was in London promoting Bring on the Empty Horses, he said to me, ‘I used to go dancing a lot with the girls I met in Hollywood. Of course, the word “dancing” is just a synonym for something a little more intimate, you understand.’

  The fact that he was seeing Merle didn’t prevent him from ‘dancing’ with many other women.

  David landed a decent supporting role in Goldwyn’s Splendour, a romantic drama in which he played a failed crook who attempts to marry a rich girl because his family has fallen on hard times. Joel McCrea, who was the film’s leading man, and Merle Oberon persuaded Elliot Nugent, the director of the film, to give David the role.

  David liked Joel McCrea but was also a little jealous of him. ‘We both started at Goldwyn the same time,’ he said, ‘and I was a little put out that Goldwyn was giving him starring roles while I was billed about sixth and seventh most of the time. Goldwyn was very busy building McCrea’s career with the right kind of parts. I began wondering why Goldwyn even took me on when he didn’t know what the bloody hell to do with me. But it was good of McCrea to lobby the director and Goldwyn to give me a decent part.’

  David recalled the horrors that awaited him on that film.

  I was trying to marry a rich girl and had a line which I’ll never forget. ‘I’d marry her millions if she had two heads and a club foot.’ I said it over and over before we filmed it so it would be stuck in my head. But when we came to shoot it, I was so nervous, I said, ‘I’d marry her club foot and two heads for her millions.’

  ‘Cut!’ The director, Elliot Nugent, was patient at first, and he just said, ‘Take two!’

  ‘I’d marry her twenty heads and club foot for…!’

  ‘Cut!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Elliot, I do know it.’

  ‘Then say the goddam line. Take three!’

  ‘I’d marry her millions if she had two feet and a club head.’

  ‘Cut!’ It took me nine or ten takes to finally get the line right. Now I can’t ever forget that line!

  The film earned David his first professional review when the New York Times noted, ‘The unpleasant Lorrimores are acted with poisonous effectiveness by Helen Westley… Katherine Alexander…and David Niven as the useless son.’

  David made a fourth film before the year was out, Rose Marie, a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. David had little chance to shine in this because, as the New York Times noted, ‘Since this is Miss MacDonald’s and Mr Eddy’s picture there can be no important place for other members of the cast.’ Another newcomer, James Stewart, also had trouble getting noticed.

  David said in 1978, ‘I had thought that acting in a film would be easy, but I found that when it came down to it I had very little confidence and was extremely nervous. I had trouble saying the few lines I had in each picture.’

  Merle suggested to Goldwyn that it might help David if he was to do a stage play. Without mentioning Merle’s part in the plan, David told me,

  Goldwyn really hadn’t a clue what kind of parts to put me in. He’d taken me on as a sort of successor to Ronald Colman but he didn’t have the scripts that called for that kind of part. So he thought I needed to learn more about acting and the best way to do that was to put me in a play, Wedding, which played at the Pasadena Playhouse. I only had three scenes and didn’t speak until the third scene when I had just two lines.

  I couldn’t resist putting it about that I had the starring role but that backfired because on the opening night I was horrified when I made my first entrance to tremendous applause. All my Hollywood friends, the Colmans, the Fairbankses, the Goldwyns, had decided to surprise me by turning up to see my starring role on the stage. I was terrified, and after my first scene I got back to my dressing room and drank three great slugs of whiskey, staggered back on for the second scene, just about made it back on for the third and made a total mess of my only two lines of the play. So to cover, I told a dirty story and then as I made my exit I walked into the scenery. I didn’t do a second night – I was fired.

  Goldwyn was furious with me and my punishment was to be laid off for six weeks – unpaid.

  It’s difficult to know if Goldwyn really did lay him off as punishment. David was hardly in demand by other studios, and Goldwyn didn’t produce enough pictures to feature all of his contract players, so it may be that David was simply out of work for a while, and probably not unpaid.

  Merle had to return to England to make two films for Alexander Korda. When she returned to America in October, David met with her in New York and they decided to drive the 3,000 miles (4,800 km) back to Los Angeles. David recalled some of this adventure to me without ever mentioning that he was travelling with Merle but did refer to the ‘Great Big Star’.

  They stopped at a hotel, possibly in Chicago, where they booked in under a false name. ‘I was absolutely broke so she was paying the bill. I didn’t mind being a kept man at all for the trip.’ Actually, Merle was paying for most things; they were living together and she was paying the rent on their house. He really was a kept man.

  On route from New York to Los Angeles, Merle had to let Goldwyn know where she was at all times and telephoned him at every stop. ‘The upshot of this,’ said David, ‘was that Goldwyn got wind of where I was and started sending me telegrams telling me to get back to Los Angeles immediately, but I figured that since I was on suspension I would just ignore them. Telegrams followed us right across America, each one angrier than the last. When we finally got back to Los Angeles Goldwyn fired me.’

  Laurence Olivier later heard about this episode but had a lot more insight into what really happened. He told me in an interview I did with him in at Shepperton Studios when he was making Dracula in 1979,

  Goldwyn was furious with David for risking the career of Merle because she was under contract to him and he was trying to present her as a sweet, virginal heroine – well, Merle was sweet, but virginal? That didn’t matter; there were precious few virgins in Hollywood, male or female. As far as Goldwyn was concerned David had risked everything he’d invested in Merle, and worse still, he had broken the strange law they have in America which forbids a man to take a woman across state lines for what they call ‘immoral purposes’. Hollywood stars were doing that all the time, and the women all went very willingly. But it would have caused a terrible scandal if he had been arrested or if someone had leaked the story to the press. The scandal would have been enormous. David just didn’t understand all that. He said to me, ‘A little car ride, that’s all it was.’ I said, ‘Yes, from East to West Coast. That’s a very long little car ride.’

  When Goldwyn fired him, Merle fixed it. She went to Goldwyn and she was so sweet and charming that he couldn’t resist her when she urged him to keep David on.

  I really think that without Merle, David would never have had a film career. He was very nearly a disaster from the start, but she kept coaching him, encouraging him, and she kept him working for Goldwyn who would have fired him and that would have been that.

  As much as David loved Merle and she loved him, he was unable to stay faithful to her. He had an insatiable sex drive. He admitted to me, ‘I just couldn’t get enough when I was a young man.’

  When I asked him if he was faithful to the Great Big Star, he said, ‘Oh, how I wanted to be, old man. But I just couldn’t. If a pretty girl came on to me, I couldn’t resist. Now, who could?’

  On Christmas Day 1935 Merle and David were among the guests at Clifton Webb’s house. Sam Goldwyn may have disapproved of David’s affair with Merle but the couple were the Goldwyns’ guests on New Year’s Eve.

  Bef
ore January was out, David was relieved to be back at work. He told me, ‘I was always sure that each film I made would be my last. I had no track record and I was sure somebody was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sorry, old man, but you really don’t cut it so off you go and don’t come back.” I was always surprised and delighted when I found myself with another job.’

  His first film of 1936 was at Paramount, Palm Springs Affair, a musical comedy that cast him as a debonair character that finally suited his own personality which may have encouraged Twentieth Century-Fox then to give him his biggest role so far, as Bertie Wooster in Thank You, Jeeves from the writings of P.G. Wodehouse. Arthur Treacher starred as Jeeves.

  Although it was a B-picture, it gave David his first leading role, and with his incurable charm, he was able to make the upper-class nitwit Wooster into a character of elegance and wit. Both Niven and Treacher were perfectly cast as Wooster and Jeeves, as the New York Times noted: ‘Mr Wodehouse must have been one of the fates in attendance at their births, marking them to play the characters he has been writing about these many years.’

  Although the film gave David a taste of being a leading man, few people got to see it. It ran barely an hour and was played only as a second feature in major cities in America. It didn’t play at all in the UK because at that time the British government imposed a very strict quota on how many films could be imported. Only A-list films from America were shown in Britain, and Thank You, Jeeves was undeniably a B-movie.

  His next film put him back into the league of a supporting actor again, but it was worth it because the picture was a Warner Brothers epic, The Charge of the Light Brigade, staring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and directed by Michael Curtiz who had turned Flynn into a star the previous year in Captain Blood. Curtiz and Flynn would repeat their success with a number of other swashbuckling epics, notably The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk.