David Niven

by Michael Munn

  When he returned home in March, Primmie became pregnant and gave up her work at the aircraft factory. She went with David wherever he was sent, and they lived out of rented rooms but were blissfully happy. ‘I don’t think David was ever so happy in his life,’ John Mills said. ‘The war was on and we all hated that, but out of it came moments of extreme bliss, and that was true of David and Primmie. He told me once, “Johnnie, the war took the lives of some wonderful friends, caused untold misery for millions and, although not profoundly important in the scheme of things, it almost wrecked my career. But the war gave me Primmie and my first son and the greatest happiness I ever knew.”’

  During the early months of 1942, Churchill and the Allied commanders prepared for Operation ‘Jubilee’, a joint Canadian and British amphibious attack on the French port of Dieppe. The plan was to seize the port, occupy France for about 12 hours, capture enemy documents and prisoners, and generally test the Germans for what would eventually be a complete Allied invasion of France.

  ‘Jubilee’ was launched in the early hours of 19 August 1942 – 252 ships loaded with troops and equipment followed mine sweepers in near radio silence, sailing from four south coast ports. There were around 4,000 Canadians, 1,000 British commandos and 50 US Rangers. They arrived 8 miles [13 km] off the coast of Dieppe at 03.00. The whole area to be attacked was divided into nine different sectors: Yellow Beach 1, Yellow Beach 2, Blue Beach, Red Beach, White Beach, Green Beach 1, Green Beach 2, Orange Beach 1 and Orange Beach 2.

  Douglas Fairbanks Jnr led a series of small diversionary raids along the French coast by commandos under his command on HMS Tormentor from which his landing craft was launched.

  It has always been assumed that Niven didn’t take part in the actual attack by Lovat’s force, but Laurence Olivier, perhaps in revenge for Niven spilling the beans about his SOE operations, told me that David was in ‘the midst of the action and was nearly killed, which wouldn’t have pleased the Government one bit as there was a general policy of keeping famous film stars away from the action. So the reports of the time said that Niv stayed out of the action. But he was there, amid the carnage and the horror, the blood and the bodies.’

  In 1979, I asked Niven if what Olivier said was true about him taking part in the raid, and he said, ‘Yes I was there. I came through it. Too many didn’t. I can’t bear to remember Dieppe. The loss of life was unpardonable.’

  Leading ‘A’ Section of Phantom, Niven accompanied Lord Lovat’s No 4 Commandos in an attack on ‘Hess’ battery at Orange Beach 2, about 1.5 miles (2.5 km) west of Dieppe. They landed on the shore at 04.50. Half the unit of 250 men followed Major Derek Mills-Roberts up a narrow gulley to the clifftop while Lovat took the rest of the unit in a wide arc to attack the battery from the rear.

  Niven said, ‘I was one of the lucky ones. Those of us with Lord Lovat had comparatively few casualties. Just about anything that could go wrong did go wrong.’

  A gunboat leading No. 3 Commando in 20 landing craft to Berneval on Yellow Beach 1 came across five armed German trawlers and a fire-fight ensued. Although the 20 landing craft were able to disperse while the gunboat was destroyed, the sound of battle was heard by the Germans. Nevertheless, one landing craft managed to land and the Goebbels battery was captured before it fired a single shot. It was the one success in what turned into a tragic disaster.

  A landing craft carrying men of the Royal Regiment of Canada lined up behind the wrong gunboat and found it was heading for the wrong beach. It took 20 confused minutes in darkness to sort out the problem but by the time the men landed on Blue Beach, the Germans, now aware they were under attack, cut them down with machine gun fire.

  Niven recalled, ‘There were 27 officers and over 500 men who landed on Blue Beach, and only three officers and less than 60 men survived. It was pretty much the same story all along the coastline, I’m afraid.’

  A total of 1,027 Allied men lost their lives, and 2,340 were taken prisoner. David told me he had to write letters to the wives and girlfriends of the men lost in his squadron. ‘It was like a scene from Dawn Patrol when the Commanding Officer wrote letters of regret. I was struggling to find the words to say, and the adjutant told me, “It doesn’t matter how you word it, sir, it’ll break her heart just the same.”

  ‘You wonder if the cost of the operation in human lives was worth it all. You could say that the mistakes at Dieppe taught us invaluable lessons that ultimately saved lives later during the Normandy invasion.’

  Niven was not supposed to have taken part in the raid. He said, ‘Because I was considered a popular actor, my safety seemed to be of greater importance than anyone else’s. That was not only an insult to me but to the thousands of men who had no choice in the matter. I talked it over with Doug [Fairbanks] and Lord Lovat, and they said that if I really wanted to go then I must. I said, “I don’t want to go. I’m a soldier, and it’s my duty.” You see, I was sending men to their deaths because one of my duties had been the assigning of men from Phantom to the mission.’

  He had told me in 1978 about what he described as ‘the hardest decision of my life. I had to choose between two radio operators who were both excellent at their jobs but the one who was the better was married with three children. I chose the better man – and he didn’t come back. I had nightmares about that decision. I still do. In my dreams I see his wife and children asking me, “Why?” I asked myself the same question over and over, but I could only answer that I made what seemed the right decision. I could have chosen the bachelor – I often thought I should have – and those are the kinds of decisions you were making all the time.’

  He admitted that he had to make life and death decisions that haunted him all his life, but he hated admitting that he took part in actual action. He said, ‘There were men – and women – who were in danger far more, and more often, that I ever was, and they are more scarred than I will ever be. The mental scars of war stay with you. My mental scars are more than I can handle. I leave them alone when I can. The horror of actual battle is more than I can stand. But I can say, today, that I am proud of the part I played.’

  He was proud but not to the point of ever wanting to boast about it. ‘I was a bighead in Hollywood,’ he said, ‘but not in the war.’

  He disobeyed orders by joining the attack force on Dieppe and risked court-martial, although as Douglas Fairbanks told him, ‘If you get killed, old boy, they’ll call you a bloody hero instead of a bloody idiot.’ Lord Lovat was complicit in the cover-up; officially Niven was never there. That suited David because he didn’t want to have to remember being there.

  I asked him if he would have been more inclined to admit he was at Dieppe had the mission been a total success. He said, ‘Oh no, old bean, I would have been court-martialled for sure. No, the only way to have been officially recognised was to have been found among the dead and I’m very glad that wasn’t the case.’

  The horror of war gave way to personal joy on 15 December 1942 when Primmie gave birth to David William Graham at the Royal Northern Hospital in London. Niven was given permission by his commanding officer to spend each night with Primmie and their baby, so every evening he got on a motorcycle and rode from Richmond to the hospital through a blacked out and heavily blitzed London to sleep on the floor next to Primmie’s bed. Not long after he took her and David Jr home to Dorney, the hospital was hit by a bomb and 12 children were killed.

  ‘David [Jr] had a good thespian start in life,’ David Snr once told me. ‘His godfather was Nöel Coward and his godmother was Vivien [Leigh].’ Larry Olivier was also at the christening and presented young David with a Jacobean drinking mug. Coward’s present to the child was a silver cocktail shaker with the inscription,

  Because, my Godson dear, I rather

  Think you’ll turn out like your father.

  Unable to escape his film star status, David Niven was sent to Glasgow on a recruiting drive, making speeches and shaking countless hands, and in January 1943, he was seconded to the
Army’s director of PR and became active in discussions with film director Carol Reed in an attempt to come up with an idea for a further morale-boosting picture. The result was The Way Ahead, a film about ordinary men recruited into the Army, and of their experiences from their first day in the Army to their first battle. It was based on a short story by Eric Ambler who, with Peter Ustinov, wrote the screenplay.

  Ustinov had enjoyed his first success as a playwright with House of Regrets, and as a private in the Army he was attached to the Army Kinematograph Service, and in that capacity he became a writer on the film which Niven would star in and which Carol Reed would direct.

  Goldwyn was reluctant to allow Niven to make another movie without being properly compensated and demanded that the production company, Two Cities, pay in full for Niven’s services. Two Cities told Goldwyn that they would simply order Niven to make the film, and Goldwyn reluctantly agreed to let them ‘borrow’ David for $100,000.

  He still had his ‘A’ Squadron duties to perform and he led his men on manoeuvres on Dartmoor where he and his men lived off the land without food and water for three days. When German E-boats were sighted off shore, Niven and his men were put into boats with their anti-tank rifles for several nights to try and find the German boats, but the Germans slipped away without a shot being fired.

  In April 1943, Niven was again released temporarily from duty so he could work on pre-production on The Way Ahead, preparing the film with Carol Reed and working closely on the screenplay with Private Peter Ustinov who, in order to be able to work with officers, had to be seconded to Niven as his ‘batman’.

  In the film, Niven played a former Territorial Army officer who is recalled to train recruits. A host of British character actors played the recruits, including Stanley Holloway, James Donald, John Laurie, Jimmy Hanley and William Hartnell. Filming began in August on Salisbury Plain with interiors shot at Denham Studios. David and his family moved into a house close to Denham. Many of their friends would often visit, such as the Oliviers, Jack Hawkins and John and Mary Mills. ‘There was quite a collection of us,’ John Mills told me (on a foggy location for the TV series Quatermass in 1978), ‘and we would meet in each other’s houses.’

  Niven recalled such a gathering at the home of Larry Olivier and Vivien; ‘I remember that no one could carve a chicken like Larry Olivier.’ Niven told me this while we were lunching at Pinewood Studios where he was filming Candleshoe. I’d opted for the chicken and had been given thick, generous slices of tender breast, and this provoked a memory Niven had of the days during World War II when he would be home on leave and he and Primmie would be visited by friends who brought their own food and drink with them. ‘Sometimes there would be a rather large party, and Larry and Vivien would always come over, and if we had a chicken Larry always did the carving. He’d been raised in a low-budget parsonage and could make a chicken do for as many as 10 people.’

  During the summer of 1943, Captain Clark Gable, on leave from the American Army Air Force and based in Britain, went to visit David and Primmie and their baby son at their thatched cottage. Gable had joined up after his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in an aeroplane crash while on a War Bonds tour. He rose from lieutenant to major and flew several bombing missions over Germany. David told me,

  Clark arrived unannounced and I was out so Primmie took care of him. I came home to find Clark Gable in his American uniform sitting in my deck chair, playing with my son, drinking my last bottle of whisky being served to him by my wife. At first I hadn’t realised it was Gable but thought it was some audacious Yank because he had changed so much, but then he said, ‘What’s the matter, Nivvy, can’t an old friend drop by to take advantage of your wife and whisky?’ and I realised it was him, and I was over the moon to see him.

  The war had changed his face. The loss of his wife had changed him. He was in complete misery over his loss, and yet even in his deep misery at the loss of Carole, he found it possible to rejoice over the great happiness that had come my way, which was very generous of him and just like him.

  We talked a bit about the war and what we’d been through. He admitted that he was always scared stiff during the bombing raids, but the thing that frightened him most was the thought of being captured by the Germans and what Hitler might do to him. He said, ‘That sonofabitch’ll put me in a case and charge 10 marks a look all over Germany.’

  He came to visit us often after that, and I thought he seemed to be gradually getting over Carole’s death, but I could see that there were times when he was overwhelmed by my own family happiness, and one evening he disappeared into the garden. Primmie found him sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow with his head in his hands. He was crying. Primmie sat down beside him and held him.

  In November the cast and crew of The Way Ahead sailed in a troopship to Algeria and Tunisia to film the battle scenes. ‘That was a worrying voyage,’ Peter Ustinov told me in 1978 when he was making The Thief of Baghdad at Shepperton Studios. ‘You never knew if you were going to be torpedoed by a U-boat or bombed by the Luftwaffe. My main concern was losing my life but Niven and Reed seemed more concerned over how the end of the film might have to be altered if we were all to be sunk.’

  With the final scenes shot, Niven returned to England at the end of November and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. By this time he had seen enough of the war, as he admitted to me years later. ‘I had enjoyed making The Way Ahead, and I was sick of the war. Who wasn’t? It may have been selfish of me but I reached the point where I just wanted to go back to Hollywood and making films. Goldwyn wanted me back for a film [Coming Home] about men returning home from the war, and I was hoping to get a release from the Army, but it took most of the next year for it to decide that it couldn’t do without me. I’m sure they could have, but they didn’t want to set a precedent, they said. My chums like Larry Olivier and John Mills and Rex Harrison all had an early release so they could make films for the war effort, but I was the one they said couldn’t do that.’

  I think David underestimated his contribution to the war. Harrison, Mills and Olivier were not ever actually in the thick of it, and ultimately, despite their own intentions of doing their duty, they were undoubtedly able to serve their country better as actors and, in Olivier’s case, as a director of the film Henry V. But Niven was a real soldier with a Sandhurst background, and he was an excellent officer.

  ‘His men under his command had tremendous respect for him,’ said Ustinov in 1984. ‘He wasn’t a mere prop – a Hollywood film star in uniform. He was a real soldier. An excellent officer. The Army needed him.’

  The Way Ahead was released in 1944 to great acclaim and even greater success than The First of the Few. The British Press were enthusiastic. Picturegoer said, ‘The dialogue is completely natural as is the humour and there is nothing forced or phoney in a single foot of a wholly enjoyable and inspiring film.’

  The Sunday Times praised Reed and the writers who had ‘admirably captured the qualities of mingled suspicions, irony and readiness to get on with the job which characterises many recruits to the British Army’, and it noted ‘the excellent playing of the whole cast’, although it did feel that ‘it was not until the second half and embarkations for overseas that The Way Ahead seemed to show its real quality’.

  The film also found favour with some American critics. ‘In one scene, wherein [David Niven] dresses down the trainees, he accomplishes a truly heart-disturbing soldier’s monologue,’ wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times.

  During the spring of 1944, David was ordered to report to General Sir Frederick Morgan in Sunningdale, and he duly arrived at the carefully camouflaged HQ in the middle of a wood where Morgan, as Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, had been working on preliminary plans for Operation ‘Overlord’, the codename for the invasion of Occupied Europe.

  David recalled,

  The first and most important decision Morgan and his staff had to make was exactly where to land on the French coast. Infor
mation was supplied to him that had come from the French Resistance about the German defences, and he had hundreds of photographs taken by the RAF. He ruled out landing in Norway, the Netherlands and the Bay of Biscay, and he had to choose between France and Belgium. The Germans knew that the most obvious landing on the French coast would be at Calais, crossing from Dover, so Morgan knew he had to plan further down the coast and [in June 1943] had arrived at the conclusion that Normandy would be the point of invasion.

  The date had originally been set for some day in June 1944, and it was shortly before then that I was summoned to Sir Frederick’s headquarters. He told me that because I had spent a great deal of time in America and I liked Americans, he was taking me out of Phantom and promoting me to lieutenant-colonel and assigned me to an American general called Barker with whom he’d worked on the initial invasion plans. I found General Barker’s Nissen hut where he told me he had been given the task by Eisenhower of making sure there were no weak links between the various Allied forces.

  Barker said, ‘From now on you take orders only from me, and when the invasion comes you will be working only with me. We will be liaising between the British and American forces. You’re going to be in the thick of it.’

  Through his work with General Ray Barker and General Morgan, Niven came into personal contact with General Sir Bernard Montgomery who was to command the Allied landing force in Normandy. The invasion was originally set for 5 June 1944, but the weather was so appalling that Eisenhower and Montgomery postponed it. On 5 June the Allied Command decided the following day would be D-Day.

  ‘The night before the invasion,’ Niven recalled, ‘Primmie and I clung together miserably. I told her I wouldn’t leave until after we’d had breakfast together. It was a kind lie, I’m afraid. She finally fell asleep just before dawn, and I quietly dressed, took one last look at my wife and my baby son who lay in the cot beside the bed, and left.’