by Michael Munn
Some of Niven’s friends made hasty judgements about her. Peter Ustinov was one of them. He told me in 1984, ‘The problem with Hjördis is that she is such a lazy woman. David was very tidy and also very punctual, but she was always late.’
I put that to Hjördis who said, ‘So are many women’, which is actually the response I gave to Ustinov who conceded, ‘Yes, true. It wasn’t so much that she was late but that she couldn’t get out of the bed in the mornings.’
I put that to Hjördis too. ‘I got out of bed, but not when David did,’ she said. ‘He was up early every morning. I said to him, “Why don’t you have a lie in?” He said he had to get up early ever since he was in the Army. He was conditioned to it. I wasn’t a soldier. I didn’t have to get up and be on parade when the cock crowed. I got up when I woke up.’
Even those who had befriended her when she first arrived in Hollywood began to turn against her. She recognised the problem but was helpless to do anything about it. She said, ‘I didn’t speak as much English as I do now, so people thought I was being cool and rude to them. Even the two boys thought I was unkind to them. They loved Pinkie, and I was happy that they had someone who could be more like a mother to them. I tried, but I could only do so much. The boys were young but sometimes they would say hurtful things like “We love Pinkie more than we love you.” Things like that. It wasn’t their fault, they were just children. They needed a mother’s love, and while I loved them, I didn’t know how to be a mother. I told them not to call me Mummy. I thought they might like it if they could call me Hjördis. Other people criticised me for that too.’
There was another growing problem. Hjördis began to drink more than she normally did. ‘I did drink a lot, but so did David,’ she told me. ‘A woman is not allowed to drink like a man. I always felt second to him. I shouldn’t be anything more than his “wife”. I shouldn’t be an actress, and I shouldn’t drink as much as him, or more than him.
‘And always producers were asking me to take screen tests. But they wouldn’t come to me, they would go to David, as if he was my manager, and he’d say, “No, no, no, she is not going to become an actress.” I didn’t want him deciding what I could or couldn’t be. I felt like I was not in control of my own mind. I hated to be controlled. So, yes, I drank a little more.’
There were other pressures on them outside of Hjördis’s control. ‘David was in a terrible mood because he was fighting with Samuel Goldwyn. People get upset. It’s life. But if I got upset, people told me, “You mustn’t upset David. He’s having a difficult time.” I think I was a good wife to him in the beginning. All these things led to me drinking more. I don’t excuse myself. I just say what it was like. I would have been a better person if I hadn’t drunk.’
Despite the terrible times that lay ahead, David always maintained that he was as much to blame for the problems as she was. ‘I love Hjördis very much, I did from the start,’ he said, speaking in 1980 to Lynne Frederick and me, proving that even towards the end of his life and his marriage he hadn’t stopped loving Hjördis. ‘Sometimes love isn’t enough. I’ve loved other women but didn’t want to be married to them. If our marriage didn’t work, it was more my fault than hers. In the first few years she was great fun. I didn’t care that she couldn’t cook. We had someone to cook for us.’
Five months after David married Hjördis, Pinkie left. Some claimed Hjördis got rid of her. Hjördis denied that. ‘I would never have fired Pinkie. For a start, David wouldn’t have let me, and for another, I couldn’t take care of the boys. I needed her. I tried to become a “mother” to them but I wasn’t strict with them and let them do what they wanted. David said I was spoiling them. I could do nothing right. The boys loved Pinkie and we needed her, but she felt she wasn’t needed any more, or maybe she didn’t like me either – I don’t know.’
David defended Hjördis, saying, ‘She never got rid of Pinkie. She begged Pinkie to stay. But I think dear old Pinkie felt she was getting in the way of the relationship between the boys and Hjördis, so she went off to San Francisco and become someone else’s super nanny.’ The boys soon had another very fine nanny called Evelyn.
In all the years I knew David, from 1970 to 1983, I never heard him blame Hjördis for the sham their marriage became, and I think that was because he knew that the problems they had, which grew from molehills into towering mountains, were as much his fault as hers. Not even David’s closest friends, many of them people I admire and respect and personally like, knew what really went on, or were prepared to accept that David’s behaviour was no better than Hjördis’s, but they are among those who have castigated Hjördis. David could do no wrong. Hjördis could do nothing right.
Nothing is ever that simple, and the story of the second Niven marriage is complex, baffling, emotional and tragic.
CHAPTER 16
—
Any Old Rubbish
Apart from having to settle into a new and not altogether comfortable marriage, Niven was also making what he knew was a dreadful picture, A Kiss in the Dark. ‘When I heard the title and that Jack Warner was personally producing it for Warner Brothers and that Delmer Daves was directing, I thought I was going to be in what might be a promising film noir,’ David told me. ‘It turned out very silly indeed.’ That was about as much as you could get from David when asking him to comment on his films. But he was right. It did sound like a film noir but turned out to be a comedy.
Niven played a mild mannered concert pianist who finds himself the unwitting owner of a run-down apartment block peopled by an assortment of odd characters including a disgruntled tenant who punches him, a pretty model (played by Jane Wyman) who treats his injury, and her fiancé who tries to sell him insurance.
The Observer complained, ‘By far the unhappiest moments of the week were those spent at A Kiss in the Dark. Starring David Niven and Jane Wyman it proceeds to waste them both in one of the silliest and trashiest stories seen on the screen for many a day.’
David knew it was a disaster before it was released in 1949, and his spirits were not raised when Goldwyn told him he was going back to Britain to make another costume adventure for Korda, The Elusive Pimpernel, a retelling of the Scarlet Pimpernel tale with Niven in the title role. I told him that I thought that he would have been encouraged that this was to be produced for Korda by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Michael Powell, but he said,
I was going to be put into more silly wigs and costumes, and I just look damn silly in all that stuff. But what really made me so mad was that I had only just got my family settled [in Hollywood] and I was going to have to take my boys out of nursery and take my new wife and get them all over to England – at my own cost. So I refused point blank to do it, and Goldwyn put me on suspension. I hoped he would see how desperate I was and be reasonable but he just told me – again – how if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have a film career. I tried to hold out, but my agent told me that Goldwyn would never back down, which I knew in my heart of hearts, and so finally, to prevent my family from sinking in poverty, I gave in but made demands. I insisted Goldwyn pay the fare, by sea, for the boys, their new nanny and for Hjördis, there and back. I wanted living expenses for myself and for Hjördis. I wanted a house close to the studio with a housekeeper, a gardener, a cook and a driver, and I wanted a clothing allowance for my sons and their nanny. I also demanded a suite at Claridge’s Hotel, tips for the hotel staff, ration books, Scotch to be sent from America, a car – everything I could think of. Goldwyn agreed, although I think he got Korda to cough up half the costs.
I behaved appallingly. I was a spoilt brat. I was conceited. But I believed Goldwyn was wrecking my career and I told him so. We had stand-up rows in his office.
At the end of July 1949, the Nivens sailed for England where David complained that the housing Goldwyn’s British representative had found was completely inadequate. Cables went back and forth across the Atlantic and Niven threatened legal action. David also demanded that since his contract allowed
him six weeks’ holiday a year he was going to take it – straight away – back in California. Alexander Korda offered Niven his own yacht to go anywhere he wanted but David insisted he was going back to America.
‘I cannot excuse my behaviour,’ David said in 1978. ‘It’s the only time in my life I was unprofessional.’ The family returned to California – at Goldwyn’s expense – and then David and Hjördis flew to Bermuda for their delayed honeymoon. All this gave Hjördis an impression of how she thought Hollywood stars behaved. She told me,
I saw a way of life I’d never imagined. Whatever David demanded, he got. I thought that was what everyone did in Hollywood. And I thought it meant that David always got what he wanted. So I decided I wanted things and made demands on David who would always say he couldn’t afford what I wanted. I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t afford them since he was getting all this free travel and free accommodation, expenses, everything he wanted from Goldwyn. We would argue and he’d say, ‘Have another drink,’ so I would drink, and so would he.
Then we had the most wonderful honeymoon in Bermuda. Life was very nice then. We laughed a lot, and we made love and we lived like royalty. I didn’t know that David couldn’t actually afford our lifestyle. He lived beyond his means, always hoping he could make more money from films. Others made a lot more money, but David wasn’t a really big star. His films didn’t make big money. I think Samuel Goldwyn was trying to make him into a star with silly costume films.
After six weeks holidaying in Bermuda, the Nivens returned to Los Angeles where Goldwyn refused to see David who, in a sulk, took Hjördis to England and finally began work on The Elusive Pimpernel in September, two months behind schedule. Filmed in England and France, it took six months to shoot. David disliked playing the part because, he said, ‘it was like being in a musical pantomime without the music.’ That wasn’t too surprising because originally Goldwyn and Korda had planned to make a musical version of The Scarlet Pimpernel but had changed their minds and decided to take out the musical numbers and hoped that Pressburger and Powell could turn it into a film of high adventure. David objected to the script as it was obvious that there were cues for each song left in it, and so there was some hasty rewriting.
He enjoyed working with Jack Hawkins again, and he did manage to get Robert Coote a decent supporting role. But he didn’t attempt to get a part for Michael Trubshawe who complained to me that Niven had been ‘pretty mean about that’.
Hjördis defended David, telling me, ‘He had no idea if Trubshawe could even act and he wasn’t going to risk getting him a part and then finding he was an embarrassment.’
David actually began to have high hopes for The Elusive Pimpernel, as he explained years later. ‘Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell knew they had a silly script and so they actually made it as a satirical picture. It was a sort of satire on costume pictures, which I thought was wonderful, but nobody got it. They opened it at the Venice Film Festival where nobody understood it, so Korda cut the film and opened it in London in what he thought was a more straightforward and conventional version, and the critics there hated it even more.’
It was finally premiered in Britain on 1 January 1951. David Lewin wrote in the Daily Express, ‘It must be one of the most expensively dull films we have made in this country for years. David Niven plays the Scarlet Pimpernel with the sheepish lack of enthusiasm of a tone deaf man called to sing solo in church.’
In Punch, Richard Mallett wrote, ‘I never thought I should feel inclined to leave a Powell and Pressburger film before the end, but I did here.’
But the British public loved it. Goldwyn hated the picture, calling it ‘the worst picture I have ever seen in my life’, and he refused to release it. Korda sued Goldwyn who counter-sued. Goldwyn had the film re-edited and released in America in 1955 as The Fighting Pimpernel – and it was a success.
But that success came too late to save David from a series of embarrassing co-starring roles, the first opposite 20-year-old former child star Shirley Temple in A Kiss For Corliss, a film intended to appeal to a teenage audience. It appealed to no one in particular. ‘Poor David Niven!’ said the Sunday Chronicle. ‘Only a really great star could save a picture in which he scarcely appears at all.’ The Star observed, ‘It’s a tiny part for David Niven but he provides a few moments of quiet humour in a raucous picture.’
Niven told me, ‘Goldwyn loaned me out for a Shirley Temple teenage pot boiler as punishment. The only good thing about it was all my scenes were shot back to back because they had started without me and they had to get all my scenes shot quickly. I’d arrive in the morning and be told which scene we were doing, and I was really rather difficult and told them I wasn’t prepared for whatever scene it was. I didn’t do myself any favours as I wanted to get the bloody film over with.’
David tried to mend bridges with Goldwyn in early 1948. ‘I wrote to Goldwyn and begged his forgiveness because I’d realised I’d behaved so badly but he didn’t even reply to my letter. That’s when I thought it was time I went freelance. I went to see Goldwyn [on 22 July] and told him that frankly we didn’t see eye to eye anymore and asked if I could be released from my contract which still had another two years to run. He simply flicked his intercom button and said, “Give Niven his release as from today. He’s through.” And that was it. I was unemployed.’
He didn’t find going freelance as easy as he had thought. Suddenly there was no work for him, and he was using up his money at an alarming rate. He was convinced that Goldwyn had his PR men put the word out that he was difficult and the result was that producers were unwilling to cast him.
Finally, in 1949, he was offered a part by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in a Mario Lanza musical, The Toast of New Orleans. It was Lanza’s first film although the real star was Kathryn Grayson as an opera singer. David was billed below them as Grayson’s manager.
‘There wasn’t much for me to do as the whole film was about Kathryn Grayson and Mario Lanza singing to each other,’ David told me. ‘But I got on fine with Mario.’
David was drinking more than usual, according to Hjördis. ‘It didn’t help that Mario Lanza drank a lot too,’ she said, ‘so the both of them were getting smashed at lunch time. The difference between them was that Lanza would fall asleep halfway through the afternoon while David appeared cold stone sober. He’d continue to drink at home, and I joined him. We were both drinking, and while he could handle it, I couldn’t. I was becoming an alcoholic.’
After the Lanza picture, David didn’t work for months, so he began trying his hand at writing a novel which he called Round the Rugged Rocks. It was about an English soldier who leaves the Army after World War II and heads for America where he sells liquor in New York, gets involved in indoor horse racing, heads for Bermuda and winds up in Hollywood as a film star. It was clearly semi-autobiographical, and anecdotes that Niven had been telling for years were included.
After a long period of ‘resting’, he landed a film early in 1950, Happy Go Lovely, a British attempt to make a Hollywood musical. In March he rented the Pink House out and sailed with his family on the Queen Mary to England to make the movie for A.B.P.C. His co-stars were Vera-Ellen and Cesar Romero. David found a house to rent close to Buckingham Palace and he also bought a huge country pile, Wilcot Manor in Wiltshire, not far from Huish where Primmie’s ashes were buried. Hjördis said that it was obvious to her that David couldn’t stay away from Primmie ‘even in death’. Primmie was, said Hjördis, ‘a ghost who would haunt me forever’.
She also thought that there really were ghosts at Wilcot Manor. ‘The house was haunted,’ she told me. ‘There is the ghost of a monk there, and I saw the spirits of two nuns rowing a boat on the lake.’
I asked her if she had been drinking. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘but I did drink after seeing the nuns.’ She laughed; she really did have a sense of humour.
David had also talked about the ghosts. ‘The poor monk had been driven out of his monastery by Henry VIII and he ha
unted the bedroom on the top floor,’ he said. ‘We didn’t live there for very long.’
David Jnr went off to boarding school, and David went to numerous London clubs, living as though he were a millionaire. He paid for his expensive lifestyle from his fee for Happy Go Lovely. ‘I really rather liked doing that picture,’ he told me. ‘The script wasn’t wonderful but I liked working with Vera-Ellen and Romero. We made of it what we could. And we had a good director, Bruce Humberstone, who was also imported from America. It was almost like making an American movie except we shot it at Elstree and had a large British supporting cast.’
Among the supporting cast was Gordon Jackson who I interviewed a number of times, one of them being in 1983 on the set of the TV series The Professionals, shortly after David had died. Jackson said, ‘David Niven was a joy. He seemed to be having a good time and was always telling funny stories. He was always after the girls. He could charm the pants off girls – literally. They all fell for him. He had quite a few of the girls working on the film, and an affair with a famous actress.’
Many of David’s friends would later accuse Hjördis of being unfaithful to him and of driving him to infidelity. But it was David who was unfaithful to her. The trouble with Niven was that he couldn’t stay faithful to one woman for long.
