David Niven

by Michael Munn

  During his long stay in England he looked up an old friend, Jamie Hamilton, who had become a publisher. He told him about the novel he had written, but it was another publisher, Cresset Press, that agreed to publish Round the Rugged Rocks, paying Niven a small advance.

  The critics didn’t care for Happy Go Lovely although they almost unanimously agreed that Niven was the best thing about it. The Daily Mail had little that was good to say about the film itself but commented, ‘Yet Mr Niven, back on top of his form after a series of disappointing pictures, is an excellent light comedian.’

  The Spectator noted, ‘David Niven’s charm helps enormously to blind one to the picture’s defects.’

  The Daily Mirror was delighted that Niven was ‘rediscovered as a light comedian with a delightful portrayal’.

  David returned to Hollywood in October and was delighted to receive a call from MGM. ‘I went to see Pandro C. Berman who was one of Metro’s top producers, and he said he had this wonderful film for me, Soldiers Three, with a wonderful cast – Stewart Granger, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Newton and Cyril Cusack. I read the script and I thought, just a minute, this is Gunga Din but without Gunga Din. And it was. So I thought, oh well, the pay is okay, and the cast were nice people.’

  Soldiers Three was, as Niven realised, a re-working of the Kipling novel and the movie of Gunga Din which he’d lost out on thanks to Errol Flynn. It would be redone again later as a Western, Sergeants Three starring Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack.

  David had to accept third billing below Stewart Granger and Walter Pidgeon. Granger had just established himself as a major new star in Hollywood with King Solomon’s Mines. He and Niven became great friends, and I had the pleasure of dining with them in 1979. They recalled their first film together.

  ‘I thought the script was so terrible I asked Cary Grant to take a look, and he said just to do the best I could and get it over with,’ said Granger.

  ‘I’ve done that on almost all my films,’ said Niven.

  ‘Do you remember what you said about it when I complained about it?’

  ‘Take the money and run?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Granger. ‘You said, “It may be shit and not very good shit but we have to do it so let’s just be cheerful about this shit.”’

  ‘That’s the best way to deal with shit, I find.’

  ‘Do you remember our director, Tay Garnett?’

  ‘He was the best audience we had,’ replied David. ‘He laughed at every scene. What a shame the paying audience weren’t made up of millions like him.’

  ‘He was convinced it was the funniest comedy script he’d ever read. He laughed at every scene,’ said Granger.

  ‘Maybe he was crying.’

  When I interviewed Granger in 1980 when he was in London promoting his autobiography, he told me, ‘I loved working with David. I thought of him as a big Hollywood star but he was my supporting actor in this, and I couldn’t understand why. I asked him what he was doing in it, and he said, “Earning some much needed money, old bean.” He was in it just for the money. I didn’t know then how hard up he was. I thought he was rich. He always behaved and lived as though he were rich. But by Hollywood standards he was struggling.’

  The film is actually quite an enjoyable romp, set in India in the 1890s. The Daily Mail called it, ‘a knock-about comedy’ and added, ‘Kipling fans will probably have a fit but my guess is that it will have many people in fits of laughter.’

  Variety felt that the comical antics ‘enliven the film’s footage and save it from missing altogether. Granger is very likeable in his comedy role. Niven also is good as the slightly stuffy aide who leads the pants-losing patrol.’

  The film wasn’t a huge hit, but I think it’s worth taking a look at, if you get the chance.

  ‘In the early 1950s, I was accepting any old rubbish being offered to me,’ David told me later. One of the worst, made in 1950, was The Lady Says No! in which he was a chauvinist magazine photographer chasing a best selling feminist authoress who gives up her ideals for his love. It was premiered on 6 January 1952 and was slated by the critics and then ignored by the public.

  Towards the end of 1950 he accepted another film purely for the money. This was Appointment with Venus, filmed in early 1951 in Britain. Niven was actually perfectly cast because he was back in a World War II British Army uniform with a mission to rescue a pedigree cow from one of the German occupied Channel Islands.

  ‘It was a comedy,’ he recalled. ‘I’m not sure that it was actually funny.’

  The American critics were especially bemused by it. ‘The humour sometimes wears a bit thin,’ noted Time. The New Yorker pointed out that it was ‘an English film [which] sets out to be a farce and then gets so earnest about itself that it winds up as a kind of blurred melodrama. Since the liberation of a well bred cow struck me as being too elfin a notion I may have missed some of the humour.’

  The Times spoke up on behalf of the Brits, observing that the picture combined comedy and adventure, ‘always a tricky mixture for a film to handle, but Appointment with Venus manages it skilfully enough even if the joke itself is a trifle faded. Still, it is pleasant to see Mr Niven going about his work.’

  In the cast was an upcoming English actor called Kenneth More who told me, in one of a number of interviews I did with him, ‘I think David is a wonderful chap. He was very nice to everyone. He was a star then, and I was just getting started.’

  David was well aware that he was the star of the film and Kenny More wasn’t. The film’s director, Ralph Thomas, who directed Niven again in 1979 in A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, told me, ‘David is no trouble to direct, always professional, and when we first worked together on that film about the cow, he was fighting to save his career and to maintain his position as the star of that film. In fact, he thought that Kenny [More] was a little too good. He’d watch the rushes and laugh at Kenny’s great comedy timing, but it worried him, and he insisted that one of Kenny’s best scenes be cut. I said to him, “Look, if you cut Kenny’s best scene, he’ll be just another supporting actor,” and Niven said “Exactly!” So I had to tell Kenny his scene was cut and he was very disappointed and as much as he liked David, after that he was wary of him.’

  It seemed that Niven could be just as ruthless as Cary Grant had been. However, he did try to make things up with More by inviting him to Wilcot Manor for the weekend. He got Kenny very drunk and then persuaded him to break a chair which David said was very ugly and should be destroyed, and so Kenny broke the chair and threw it on the fire. In the morning he came downstairs to find Hjördis distraught that her favourite chair was gone. David told her, ‘Kenny burned it.’ She yelled at More and refused to speak to him for the rest of his stay.

  While he was in England making Appointment with Venus, David did some painting in his spare time. It was a new hobby which he’d taken up as his film career continued to stall. He even had one of his oil paintings exhibited at the Trafford Gallery in London along with other famous amateur artists.

  The prospects of another film coming his way any time soon were bleak, and so Noël Coward got a friend of his, stage producer John Wilson, to offer Niven a play. It hardly seemed the right move for David, who had failed in Wedding, his only previous stage play, but with nothing else on offer, he returned to New York to rehearse Nina in September 1951. Hjördis went with him, but they left the boys in England – David Jnr to attend boarding school and Jamie to live at Wilcot Manor with Evelyn.

  Nina was a French bedroom farce that had been a huge hit in Paris. It had a cast of three; David, former silent screen goddess Gloria Swanson and Alan Webb. Surprisingly, David relaxed into his new role of a stage actor and did well. The play premiered in Hartford, Connecticut in November, then moved on to Boston, Philadelphia and finally Broadway where it ran at the Royale Theatre for 45 performances. Somewhat surprisingly, David Niven had become a successful stage actor, but the stage wasn’t where he wanted to be.

  He did,
however, want to be an author, and his first book, Round the Rugged Rocks was published in December 1951. Sheridan Morley told me, ‘I think it was the best thing he ever wrote. It’s a wonderful light comedy. It’s written in something of a jocular journalistic style and although it was all based on his own experiences he insisted it was not an autobiography. It quickly went out of print and he made sure it stayed out of print because so much of it turned up in The Moon’s a Balloon and Bring on the Empty Horses.’

  It sold around 5,000 copies, which wasn’t bad for a first novel, and it also came out in paperback. But the royalties weren’t enough to live on, and stage producers didn’t pay much, so what he really needed was a boost to his film career.

  He returned to Los Angeles and hoped for the best. He brought the boys back to California and was, said Hjördis, ‘an excellent father. He spent time with the boys and they loved him very much. He wouldn’t tolerate them telling lies, and he taught them to be polite. He was a more natural parent than I ever could be. I think he made an effort because his own parents had not shown much attention to him.’

  The boys grew to dislike Hjördis who showed little interest in them. She became more aloof and friends found her to be growing ever more distant. She tended to suffer from bouts of depression and her drinking had increased. The problem was that while she might have been a poor mother and David was a good father, David was also proving to be less than a fine husband. He was continuing an affair he had begun while filming in England – and Hjördis knew it.

  ‘I was depressed because David was already having affairs,’ she said. ‘He was never faithful to me. I’ve been accused of being the one who was unfaithful. Well, yes, later I was unfaithful, but that was because he was going with other women, and I thought, to hell with him, I can do that also. But again, in Hollywood, a man can play around, but a woman?

  ‘My depression was not just a sulk. I was really suffering from depression. People told me to snap out of it. But when you are depressed and not just having a sulk, it is hard. It is an illness. I didn’t know I was ill, but I was.’

  As the crisis in David’s career deepened, the more he fooled around. I asked him why he couldn’t stay faithful, and he said, ‘There are times of crisis when I need the relief.’ That may have been part of the reason. And his career was certainly in crisis. But he was about to be thrown a lifeline from a most unexpected source.

  CHAPTER 17

  —

  Four Star

  Just as it looked like he would never find success as a screen actor, David landed firmly on both feet in television. It was the medium that Hollywood considered its greatest enemy. Film stars were not supposed to do television; it was only the newcomers, the unestablished actors that did regular television drama. David had done just a couple to start with, Portrait of Lydia in 1950 and Not a Chance in 1951. But in 1952 he did four-The Petrified Forest, A Moment of Memory, The Sheffield Story and Sword Play.

  Most of them were aired live, and his stage experience allowed him the confidence to perform well. But he was warned by well meaning friends that he would be blacklisted by the major Hollywood studios for doing too much television. He told then, ‘What difference does it make? I’m blacklisted anyway.’

  He might never have made another film – at least, not in Hollywood – had it not been for director Otto Preminger who had seen him on stage in Nina and was so impressed that he wanted him to be in a movie he was about to make, The Moon is Blue, a comedy of romantic errors set in a New York bachelor pad and based on a successful and slightly risqué stage play.

  Preminger thought it would be a great idea to put on the play and have David star in it as preparation for the film. United Artists, who were financing the film, told Preminger he was crazy to hire Niven who was washed up in Hollywood. But Preminger stuck to his guns and David had considerable success on stage in The Moon is Blue in California.

  At the theatre next to his, in San Francisco, Charles Boyer was appearing in Don Juan in Hell. Niven and Boyer had dinner together several times, and one time Boyer revealed that he and Dick Powell were forming a TV production company and asked David if he would like to join them. With nothing to lose, David agreed, and so he, Boyer and Powell started Four Star Playhouse. They had hoped to actually find a fourth star to join them in their venture, but every Hollywood star they approached backed quickly away. Many, however, agreed to appear in their productions, such as Merle Oberon, Joan Fontaine, Ronald Colman and Ida Lupino who went on to become a regular with the company acting and directing.

  Four Star became one of the most successful production companies in television, producing one-off dramas and regular series such as The Rifleman, Zane Grey Theatre and Wanted Dead or Alive which launched the career of Steve McQueen.

  ‘I rather liked being a producer at last,’ David told me. ‘There was always regular work for me, and I had plenty of acting work in my own productions. I was never going to be out of work again.’ Four Star Playhouse became a popular series, and David starred in an episode called The Island in 1952. Many more episodes would follow.

  To Hjördis’s surprise and delight, David suddenly offered her a role in one of his productions. This seeming change of heart he had about her being an actress backfired. She recalled,

  After years of telling me I mustn’t become an actress, he told me he wanted me to be in one of his television films. He said he needed someone to play a foreign spy and he thought my accent would make me sound like Mata Hari or something.

  I found I really enjoyed doing it. And I thought that because David had allowed me to be in his production, he would be happy if I did some films. I was offered a part opposite Robert Taylor. I thought that I could finally become something other than a good wife and a bad mother. But David refused to let me do the film. I understood his concern. He’d known many Hollywood marriages to break up. He said, ‘I’ll be at one end of the world making a film and you’ll be at the other end, and there will be temptation.’ He meant one or other of us would have an affair. I felt like I was being accused but he was the one not resisting temptation.

  Hjördis began to sink further into bouts of black despair and heavy drinking.

  On top of his success as a TV producer, David starred in Preminger’s film version of The Moon is Blue, opposite William Holden, Maggie McNamara and British actress Dawn Addams. It outraged many because the dialogue included words such as ‘seduce’ and ‘virgin’ and was condemned by the Catholic Church and banned by the censor in America. United Artists and Preminger defied the censor and were successful in getting local counsils to grant the film distribution to great success; it was the first time the American censor had been bypassed.

  Its notoriety caused much publicity and almost guaranteed its success. It also happened to be a good film in which David was excellent, earning him the Golden Globe Award for the best comedy performance of the year. Maggie McNamara was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and the critics received it generally well. Kine Weekly, the British film trade publication, said, ‘David Niven completely disarms’, and Variety said, ‘Niven’s middle-aged playboy is mighty fancy play-acting.’

  It wasn’t all play-acting. I got to know Dawn Addams in 1974 when I worked at Columbia-Warner, and discovered that he was playing the middle-aged playboy very successfully with her. ‘I think the film’s racy theme had an effect on David,’ she told me. I think she may have been the actress he had been having an affair with in England.

  I asked Hjördis why she tolerated his affairs. She answered, ‘What could I do? I loved him, and I kept thinking he would change. But he was a man who needed sex all the time and he needed it from different women. He couldn’t be monogamous. I don’t know why. I thought of divorcing him many times.’

  She hoped that a holiday they took to Rhode Island in November 1952 would help their ailing marriage. They were supposed to spend a weekend shooting pheasants, but Hjördis had a premonition. ‘I am psychic,’ she told me. ‘That’s why I can se
e ghosts. And I can sometimes see the future. I dreamed that I would be shot and I told David I didn’t want to go shooting. He wanted me to go and said I was being silly, so I went. I was shot in the face and neck, and in my chest.’

  David was severely shaken by the accident and feared he was about to lose a second wife. But the injuries were not severe. She had been hit by just three pellets, and while the injuries to her face, neck and chest healed easily enough, the marriage didn’t. She was suffering more bouts of depression and began to experience panic attacks. He thought she was faking it.

  ‘I didn’t recognise that she was really becoming most unwell,’ he told me in 1982. ‘I’d seen Vivien Leigh suffer from mental illness, and I didn’t want to think that my own wife could be mentally ill as well. It wasn’t the same. Vivien was a manic depressive which is an actual condition. Hjördis was suffering from…things in her life.’

  She had experienced a trauma in childhood which affected her for the rest of her life and at some point she shared her secret with David, but he never told me what it was. ‘That is not my place,’ he told me, which was right and proper.

  However, in 1986 she told me what had happened to her. ‘I was abused when I was small.’

  ‘Abused sexually?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, and began to cry. ‘I can’t. I wish I could. I was just a child and he did things.’

  She wouldn’t say who ‘he’ was except that he was a member of her family. The trauma of that experience had never left her, and it took a long time before she was able to discover through therapy that this was the cause of her initial depression and anxiety. It was only made worse by David’s infidelity. Her desire to break out of the domestic role he had firmly cast her in and become an actress, a career she had not originally sought when she married him, added further despair; it wasn’t that she wanted to be an actress but she craved control over her own life. She told me that she felt she had not been in control of her life since being abused.