by Michael Munn
He said, ‘Berlin.’ He looked entirely dejected, totally despairing. I asked him where he was going, and he said, ‘Home.’ He said he was almost there. He looked to the village I had just come through. We just stared at each other for what seemed a long time.
Then I said, ‘Go home,’ and then I added, rather ridiculously I suppose, ‘but cover your bloody boots.’ He just closed his eyes, breathed a huge sigh that was almost a sob, covered his face with both hands, and then they drove on.
As far as his own efforts during the war were concerned, Niven said, ‘I can’t claim to have exerted much pressure on the squabbling field marshals and generals, but I guess that I must have done my job well because that September General Barker pinned the American Legion of Merit on me.’
David’s other medals for his excellent war service were the 1939-45 Star, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal, and the War Medal 1939-45. But he received no medal for his action at Dieppe. The official records omitted his participation.
As the son of a man who, like millions of others, played his part in the war on Nazism and gave us our freedom, I’d like to say that I feel David Niven played his part well – as well as any part he ever played on screen. He was, as Peter Ustinov said, the real thing and not just a mere prop.
CHAPTER 13
—
The Greatest Tragedy
David finally retuned home from the war on 31 May 1945. He had tactfully maintained contact with Sam Goldwyn throughout the war with letters relating his news and always making sure that Goldwyn knew he was looking forward to coming back and working for him.
‘I knew that Goldwyn was my best chance of getting back into films in Hollywood after the war,’ he said. ‘So I made sure that I never lost touch, and I had some very nice letters back from him. Some of them were quite touching and, I think, sincere. But I could never forget that he was first and foremost a businessman, and he would only use me if I could make him money. And I needed, desperately, to get back to Hollywood.’
Goldwyn wrote to him and told him he wanted to see him back in Hollywood as soon as possible. In August he gave Niven a new five-year contract starting at $3,000 a week but told him he had to stay in England to make A Matter of Life and Death. Goldwyn had wasted no time loaning him to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the successful partners who produced, directed and wrote their films in Britain.
The film kept Niven in England through the summer and early autumn of 1945. ‘I really didn’t want to do it,’ he told me. ‘It was actually intended as a bit of propaganda, made on the instructions of the Ministry of Information who wanted Powell and Pressburger to come up with something that bridged the growing divisions between the Americans and the British. I felt I’d done enough bridge building in the war. What I couldn’t know at the time was that these two amazing film makers would come up with something absolutely so mind-boggling that at the time it wasn’t at all well received.’
In the hands of Powell and Pressburger, this bridge building exercise became a dreamlike fantasy, bold and imaginative, with some scenes in black and white and others in colour, telling of a dying RAF pilot, played by Niven, who finds himself before a heavenly tribunal with a strong anti-British prosecutor, played by Raymond Massey. In both the real world and the imagined world – if, indeed, it is imagined – appears a girl, played by American actress Kim Hunter.
It baffled some critics, delighted others, and gave David a really solid role that he said was, ‘by far the most difficult part I’d had up till then. I found myself having to actually be an actor. It wasn’t enough to fall back on my military background. In this, Michael Powell was very helpful to me. A very fine director.’
The film had the distinction of being chosen to be the first Royal Film Performance, a matter that bewildered the Daily Graphic which announced, ‘There will be widespread editorial indignation at the choice for our first Royal Film Performance of a picture which might have been made specially to appeal to isolationist and anti-British sentiments in the United States.’
The Observer was unable to understand what the producers were trying to do: ‘The main trouble with A Matter of Life and Death which is original in conception, honestly acted by Mr Niven and Kim Hunter, is that it leaves us in grave doubts whether it is intended to be serious or gay. When they tell me that it is a “stratospheric joke” I reply that a matter of life and death can never be a good joke.’
The Sunday Express seemed to get the joke, and it liked Niven’s performance: ‘David Niven gives the thoughtful whimsical joke a warm and human heart.’
There was more praise for David from the Daily Telegraph: ‘David Niven has done nothing quite so good as his airman trembling on the brink of a nervous breakdown without ever lapsing into hysteria.’
It also found favour with some American critics. The Journal-American thought it ‘beautifully written, beautifully acted, beautifully executed. You would think such formidable merits would add up to quite a film – and darned if they don’t.’
The film was too abstract to be a commercial success on either side of the Atlantic. Niven said, ‘At first I thought that Goldwyn was simply trying to sabotage my career before I could get back to Hollywood when I started on the picture by loaning me out to make this film I didn’t understand to start with. But I’m glad I did it. I got to find something inside of me as an actor I didn’t know was there. Or if I suspected it was there, I hadn’t had the opportunity to practise it before.’
While he was still making A Matter of Life and Death, the British taxman demanded several thousand pounds he said David owed because he had been a British resident since 1939. He argued that he had only come back to fight in the war, but he was told he still had to pay and was given three years to do so.
In November he was at last discharged from the Army, but he remained a reservist until 1954.
On 6 November, Primmie gave birth to their second son, James Graham – they always called him Jamie – in London. They hired a nurse, Beryl Rogers, who always wore a pink nanny’s uniform and so was nicknamed Pinkie by David and Primmie.
In December David sailed back to America, leaving Primmie and the two boys to join him later. He arrived in New York on 10 December and, after being the guest of a party thrown in his honour at the 21 Club, he caught a sleeper train to California and arrived in Pasadena two days before Christmas. A huge banner was hung at the Goldwyn studio – WELCOME HOME, DAVID. A huge press party was thrown by Goldwyn at which he made a speech about David’s great courage and solid character. ‘It was all bullshit,’ said David, ‘but I thoroughly enjoyed the bullshit.’
I felt I was finally back home where I belonged, and I was playing the Hollywood game. Hedda Hopper was there and made a speech about how wonderful I was – so I knew it was bullshit – but that was Hollywood, and I loved it. When I made my speech I told them how happy I was to be home among my friends and that I was never, ever, going to talk about the war. All I did say was that I had been asked by some American friends to try and find their son’s grave in Belgium. It was in the middle of 27,000 other graves of American soldiers, and I said to myself that here were 27,000 reasons why I should keep my mouth shut. I think they were all very understanding about it.
Goldwyn said to me, ‘David, I’m proud of you. A lot of guys come back from Europe having had it quite cushy compared to you, and they sound off about what they accomplished. But you have humility,’ and coming from Goldwyn that was a sincere and unforgettable compliment. There were times, you know, when Goldwyn was someone I was really fond of. And I think he was fond of me. But business just got in the way.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling too well, and during the last stages of lunch I began to feel really ill, and ended up with a bronchial pneumonia. I had to take to my bed, and some time later I talked to John Huston about it. He’d really been in the thick of it in Italy, filming combat and really coming under heavy fire, and he shot a film in a hospital where servicemen were suffering
terrible trauma which they used to call shell shock. I said, ‘I got through the whole war perfectly fit and well, and when I got back to California I came down with pneumonia.’ He said it was common for soldiers to hold on physically through the worst times, and when it was safe and there was nothing to threaten them, they often sort of loosened up, and then they were overcome with all kinds of physical and mental illness. He said he had it himself. He had the shakes. He said that I probably had bronchial pneumonia months before but some kind of will power kept me going until I relaxed – and then I got it.
Goldwyn didn’t waste time loaning David out again, this time to Hal Wallis who was producing The Perfect Marriage. Niven and Loretta Young played a couple whose marriage, on their 10th wedding anniversary, suddenly hits the rocks. As Niven put it, ‘It was about married people who in the end don’t get divorced.’ And that was all there was to it. Loretta Young told me, ‘My career had peaked by the time I made that movie with David, but I knew he might find it hard to get work of any quality when he came back – the same happened to a lot of stars; Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable for instance – and so I asked for David. I knew, as well, that without him the picture would have been a lot worse. I felt he and I had a chemistry that might just pull it off.’
The chemistry didn’t. David’s first Hollywood film after the war was a disaster. The Times felt that the film ‘pretends at a sophistication never present in the luxurious sets, and Mr Niven, that most admirable and sophisticated actor, seems to think that if he can keep quiet enough the whole thing will turn out to be a delusion’.
‘My prompt regard for David Niven,’ wrote the film critic in the Observer, ‘prompts me to say very little about The Perfect Marriage.’
While waiting for Primmie and the boys to arrive, David spent his time fishing, playing golf and tennis, and chasing women. He even attempted a romance with Loretta Young who let that little secret slip when she told me, ‘He was lonely when he came home from the war so we spent some time together and I thought for a while he might even want to marry me.’
This might have seemed a delusion of Loretta’s, but Ava Gardner, then a starlet who had arrived in Hollywood during Niven’s absence and who David would later pursue, told me that Loretta, despite her Catholic beliefs, was ‘not a saint, although she liked to be portrayed as Saint Loretta, and believe me, she was just as amorous as the rest of us. Nivvy was having his way with her while she was married [to producer Tom Lewis] and he was married [to Primmie]. That was the game everyone played in Hollywood. The only difference was that Loretta thought Nivvy might actually divorce Primmie – as if that was ever going to happen. I guess a lot of other men would divorce their wives for Loretta Young.’
David looked for a house to buy and found it on a hill above Sunset Boulevard. He was only able to buy it because Sam Goldwyn loaned him the deposit. It was a rambling old building with a huge garden and a view of the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. It was painted pink which was the colour of Primmie’s home when she was a child – so it remained pink and was called the Pink House.
‘There was a lot of pink,’ David once said rather wistfully when he lunched with Lynne Frederick and I in 1980. ‘The house was pink and our nurse was pink.’
He didn’t want to move in without Primmie, so while he awaited the arrival of his family he rented himself a house in Beverly Hills. Primmie and the boys finally arrived at the end of March 1946. She fell in love with the Pink House and, rather than move straight in, wanted to furnish it herself so that when it was ready he could carry her over the threshold. She began the adventure of decorating it and buying exactly the kind of furniture she felt would make it her home as well as sending for personal items from England.
The Hollywood social whirl began almost at once for Primmie as she was whisked off to meet David’s friends and to attend parties and eat out at swish restaurants. ‘He loved showing her off to everyone,’ Laurence Olivier recalled, ‘and everyone fell in love with her. He needed a car so I sold him one – a black Packard I had left behind when I went back to England and didn’t need anymore.’
In April 1946 Niven started work on Magnificent Doll, another loan-out which earned Goldwyn $100,000. He did, however, give David a bonus which came to several thousand dollars. ‘He was trying to buy me off,’ David told me. ‘Before the war he had promised me that he would only star me in Goldwyn pictures, but he was reneging on that gentlemen’s agreement. I wrote and told him that I would only be truly happy when I was working at my “home” studio. As for the film he stuck me in, it was rather dire, I’m afraid, despite Ginger Rogers.’
Ginger Rogers was given top billing in Magnificent Doll and David’s name came second. The fact was, Niven wasn’t, and would never be, a top rated star in Hollywood. It took a long time for him to accept that, and only in his latter years did he come to terms with the fact that he was never as big a star as he had hoped to be. He recalled,
I was lacking in something. I don’t know what it was, but if anyone knew what it was they would have bottled it and we would have all had some, and that would have done no good to anyone. We needed – we still need – the major stars – superstars they call them these days. The Gables and the Coopers, the Bette Davises and the Crawfords. But even those people could bomb disastrously in the wrong pictures.
After the war the studios had trouble finding the right kind of pictures for me. I think it took time for it to dawn upon them that I had already made the right kind of pictures for me during the war. That’s why I’ve worked so much in war films or pictures with a military backdrop. If you want a dependable British officer, call for Niven. I knew I was good at light comedy. But Cary Grant got all the best scripts first.
Magnificent Doll was a period piece set during the early days of American independence. Ginger Rogers played a woman who runs a boarding house and is much admired by Senator Aaron Burr, played by Niven, who is plotting to become the first Emperor of America. David was cast as a villain but, he admitted, he didn’t know how to be a villain. ‘I tried to be nasty, but it’s hard to be nasty to Ginger Rogers’ he said. ‘So I just read the lines and didn’t make much of an attempt to be nasty at all.’
The Sunday Times noticed ‘David Niven as Aaron Burr looking traitorous in a gentlemanly sort of way’. The Daily Express said, ‘David Niven plays Aaron Burr as if he were cheering on the boat race.’
David recalled, ‘I thought I recognised a political slant to that picture. There was some ill feeling towards the British from the Americans after the war, and since we had been the villains in their war of independence, they decided a smooth talking English actor would make the perfect corrupt American senator. I was beginning to think that being an English actor in America after the war wasn’t such a good idea after all.’
He was beginning to have doubts about a future in Hollywood.
He was able to take a week off from filming Magnificent Doll, and he and Primmie joined a group of friends – Clark Gable, Nigel Bruce, Ida Lupino and Rex Harrison – on a short vacation in Monterey to fish and play golf. Back at the Pink House, Pinkie the nanny was taking good care of the boys who came to love her, and she them.
I have heard it said, and have read, that Niven didn’t like Rex Harrison and that he told Sam Goldwyn that he would never work with James Mason and Rex Harrison because he felt they had shirked their duty by staying out of the war. Actually, Harrison served in the RAF, a fact which had escaped David at the time of his complaint, and he and Harrison became good friends. I did a formal interview with Rex Harrison in 1982 in Norfolk, where he was filming an episode of Tales of the Unexpected; we both knew of David’s terminal illness then.
‘I knew David a little and we got on very well,’ Harrison said. ‘He’d had a marvellous war record and I suppose I was something of a military lightweight compared to him because he was and had always been a professional solider. I got into the RAF when war broke out, and I was one of those actors the government didn’t w
ant getting killed, so I was kept at home. David told me he was envious, that he had often wanted to get out of the war and get back to Hollywood. But he was torn between duty and ambition, and I don’t think the Army was prepared to let a professional soldier like him go.’
Back in 1946, Harrison and his wife Lilli Palmer were to play a part in the greatest tragedy of David Niven’s life.
At the end of the holiday in Monterey, David and Primmie returned to Hollywood on Sunday 19 May and went to a party at the home of Tyrone and Annabella Power where many of Niven’s friends were gathered including Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, Bob Coote, Richard Greene and his then wife Patricia Medina.
David never spoke to me about what took place there; he was able to write about it in The Moon’s a Balloon, but he was never actually able to talk about it to me. I don’t think he talked about it to many. But I did get two accounts of what happened, one from Patricia Medina who I met in London in 1980 when I interviewed her husband Joseph Cotton, and the other from Rex Harrison when I interviewed him.
‘David loves games, always has,’ said Harrison (speaking of Niven in the present tense in 1982). ‘Cesar Romero was there and he said he knew of a game called “sardines” where people play hide and seek but in the dark. So it was decided to play this childish game and we turned off all the lights. Nobody could see where they were going and there was a lot of whispering throughout the house.’
Harrison recalled hearing what he described as ‘a sickening serious of thuds, and I just knew that someone had fallen down steps. Primmie had gone through the wrong door. It was the door to the cellar, and she had stepped into the dark but there was no floor, just stone steps and as she stepped forward into empty air she went down, all the way. A terrible, ghastly tragedy.’
