by Michael Munn
The Pink Panther wasn’t as funny as it might have seemed on paper and its saving grace was Sellers as Clouseau. It is Peter Sellers’ contribution to the film that made it a success which both pleased and irritated David. He told me, ‘I thought this was going to be an improvement on the Raffles idea, and I was going to get to play a Raffles character in a major film made by a good director. We had beautiful Capucine and Claudia Cardinale, and we had Robert Wagner who became one of my very best friends, and we had Peter Sellers. But as I watched him on the set and saw how Blake Edwards [the director] would go into uncontrollable laughter on every take, I knew I was not going to win. It was Peter Sellers’ film. So I took the money, bent over and took it like man. The film was a hit and I was in it which counted.’
Over the lunch I had with David and Sellers’ widow Lynne Frederick in 1980, David told us, ‘I remember Peter coming to me and saying, “Look here David, this idiot I’m playing is going to ruin this picture and I don’t know what to do about it.” So I said, “Are you mad, Peter? You’re the best thing in this film.” He said, “But maybe I should do it differently. I should get Blake to reshoot all my scenes.” I said, “Don’t you dare. I need a hit film. I’m counting on you.” He wasn’t at all sure I was right. But look what happened.’
The film was a huge hit and David was right about Sellers. As the film critic in the News of the World observed, ‘I never thought someone would steal a picture from that old professional David Niven, but it’s happened, so help me.’
The film spawned several sequels featuring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, all of them an improvement on the original, concentrating on Sellers’ genius as the bumbling French detective. For David, alas, it was his last success for a while as he made a series of mediocre films that could have brought his career to a premature end if it wasn’t for one thing – his tremendous success with his first autobiography.
CHAPTER 21
—
A Sham Marriage
Hjördis returned home from hospital early in 1963. It had been a long stay but she had been treated for more than just her physical injuries. David told me, ‘She needed help with her drinking and anxiety problems. She was getting through so much vodka but then she started on that awful Fernet Branca. The place would smell of Fernet Branca. She loved that terrible stuff.’
I had no idea what Fernet Branca was until Hjördis told me in 1986. ‘It’s a very strong alcoholic drink. I was told it would help to clean my system, like some kind of drain cleaner.’ She laughed and said, ‘What a fool I was.’
Her long stay in hospital did do her some good. ‘I was getting some very good help then, not just for my broken leg,’ she said. ‘I was getting help for my depression and anxiety. So I was there for many months, and David came to see me every Sunday, but I was on my own the rest of the time while he was spending the summer playing around again, having flings with young pretty girls.’
I don’t believe she ever knew about David’s affair with Ava in Spain but she was well aware that he was seeing other women. ‘I got my revenge,’ she said. ‘Jack Kennedy wanted a quickie, and I gave him a quickie.’ This happened, apparently, when the Nivens went to the White House in Washington to join in the celebrations for President Kennedy’s 46th birthday. Hjördis said, ‘He gave me a disease. Chlamydia. It taught me that revenge is not the solution. After that I just got worse. Drinking more, rejecting David. I felt like I was tumbling downward and didn’t know how to get back up. Sometimes I was able to pull myself together and behave when we were with other people.
‘I tried to behave with the boys. I tried to get on with them. The best times were when David was away filming. But when he came home for the weekends, we quarrelled. I think I had become so suspicious and jealous of what he would have been getting up to that whenever I saw him come home something inside me just made me want to be angry at him. But I think I got on well with the boys when he wasn’t there.’
JFK had his birthday bash and a quickie from Hjördis during the time David was making his first film in America since Please Don’t Eat the Daises. Bedtime Story teamed Niven with Marlon Brando. The off-beat casting generated a great deal of publicity and the two actors got on remarkably well. Niven kept Brando laughing throughout production and David said he enjoyed making the film. ‘People think Marlon has no sense of humour,’ he told me. ‘He has a wonderful sense of humour. He told the funniest stories and was never anything but pleasant and friendly.’
They played conmen preying on attractive women. The critics hated it. The Daily Express called it ‘the most vulgar and embarrassing film of the year’. The Observer noted, ‘The film was shot, unfortunately not fatally, by Clifford Stine.’
In September David joined Charles Boyer, Robert Coote, Gladys Cooper and Gig Young in New York to launch a new Four Star series called The Rogues. They each played members of an international organisation of conmen preying on the rich all over the world. It was a tremendously successful series in which David appeared in seven episodes. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed doing it,’ he said, ‘because I was able to play a part that was both Raffles and The Phantom from The Pink Panther, and this time I was able to do a good job of it.’
The Rogues was the last TV drama Niven did for 10 years as he spent the rest of the 1960s going through a series of films that ranged from mediocre to downright awful. In Where the Spies Are in 1965 he played a British secret agent called Dr Jason Love. It was made when producers were cashing in on the success of the James Bond films but this was a poor imitation, although Alexander Walker of the London Evening Standard liked it; ‘A vintage star as engagingly witty and implausibility-proof as Mr Niven is worth any Bond-man’s arsenal of booby-trapped accessories and machine made death traps. I welcome him like a flesh-and-blood transfusion in a kind of film that is now tottering under the weight of its own gimmickry.’ The film wasn’t successful enough to spawn sequels.
Lady L starred Sophia Loren as a woman who goes from being a poor laundress to a rich widow. David played one of her numerous lovers, and his friend Peter Ustinov wrote and directed the film. It proved to be an expensive flop.
The films got worse. Eye of the Devil in 1966, co-starring Deborah Kerr, was a horror film which the Sunday Times said was ‘hilariously bad’.
Worst of all was Casino Royale, an unofficial James Bond movie made as a comedy which nobody understood. John Huston, who directed some of it, never understood it, neither did Peter Sellers, nor George Raft or Orson Welles who were among the cast members I personally knew, and neither did Deborah Kerr and David Niven. It was, said the Guardian, ‘a big colourful, noisy, star-studded, plot-less junk pile of a mess’.
There followed The Extra ordinary Seaman in 1968, an anti-war satire. Marjorie Bilbow writing in Today’s Cinema said, ‘Anyone looking forward to David Niven, Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rooney will be sadly disappointed.’
David co-starred with Deborah Kerr again, in Prudence and the Pill in 1968. Time called it a ‘cretinous comedy’, and the New York Times said of the stars, ‘because their parts are unendurable they give the worst, worst performances of their lives.’
Niven was accepting anything offered to him just for the money. The Impossible Years in 1968 was about the generation gap which the Times thought to be ‘of a dreariness which not even the usually saving presence of David Niven and Lola Albright, as the troubled parents, can alleviate’.
Before Winter Comes in 1969 saw him as a British officer running a refugee camp in Austria in the spring of 1945. Time was unimpressed by what it considered to be ‘vague plot, conventional camera-work and a feeble scenario’.
He went to France to make Le Cerveau, known in America and Britain as The Brain. Niven played a gentleman master criminal and the brain behind the British Great Train Robbery.
David had no excuse for making such bad films other than for the money. ‘I needed to pay for the lifestyle I enjoyed,’ he said to me. He particularly enjoyed lavishly entertaining people at Châ
teau d’Oex and also on the Côte d’Azur. He was at his happiest when friends came to visit, but despite Hjördis’s long stay in hospital, she had deteriorated again and was becoming an embarrassment.
‘I have always enjoyed entertaining guests,’ he said. ‘I like to have lunch parties at home. She started leaving the table before anyone else and going to her room. She hardly ever ate. I don’t understand how she hasn’t starved herself to death. Eventually she stopped coming down to join me and our guests.’
Hjördis denied that she starved herself, although she did grow thinner. She didn’t know it at the time but she had an eating disorder. ‘Of course I ate,’ she said in 1986. ‘I had a good breakfast every morning, but not much else in the day. Food would make me feel sick.’
She was paranoid about eating in front of other people. ‘I couldn’t face people. I couldn’t face eating. I’d stay in my room, drinking, making telephone calls. I hardly went out. Going out was sometimes the most terrifying thing for me. I had panic attacks going outside. I had panic attacks in the night. I was on Valium, and when you take that you shouldn’t drink because it can kill you. It is a wonder I am still alive.’
David found it increasingly difficult to cope with her. He told me in 1980, ‘I wanted to love her, and I did, and I still do, but often I just want to get out of the house and get away from her. She isn’t good company, and she can’t do anything. What she can do is make herself look very good, and she can arrange flowers. But that’s all.’
One person who did like Hjördis was Princess Grace who became most concerned about her and wanted to help. David recalled, ‘Grace said to me, “I’ll talk men with her. Just girl talk.” I said, “Any kind of talk. Please, Grace, just do something.’”
Hjördis told me, ‘One of my best friends was Grace. I felt comfortable with her. We talked a lot about men. She was a very naughty girl, you know. She had a lot of affairs in Hollywood. She had an affair with David.’
But David admitted to me that he had to take the blame for many of Hjördis’s troubles, although he was not to blame for the childhood trauma that was the root cause of all her problems. He said he was the one who strayed long before she started taking lovers. He was even unfaithful to Primmie. That was his fatal character flaw.
But he didn’t give up on Hjördis. She told me, ‘David asked me what would make me happy. I said I couldn’t just be happy. But I thought that adopting another girl would help. We found a beautiful little baby girl, just four months old, and an orphan. We called her Fiona.
‘I had really grown to love Kristina. It was hard at first because of the circumstances, but it wasn’t her fault, and I really loved her, and I loved Fiona right from the start. I wasn’t a good mother. I had no real idea what a mother does, but I made sure they were always dressed very nicely. The best French clothes. I was so proud of them. Having the girls helped me a lot. Things were better between David and I, and we started to laugh together a lot more.’
Fiona was adopted in December 1963. She was four months old. By this time David’s sons were living in America. David Jnr was working in New York at the William Morris Agency, and Jamie, 18 years of age, was about to go to Harvard University. David saw very little of his sons as he was so busy making films in Europe.
In 1966 David started to write his autobiography. What he really wanted to do was write a novel but his friend Jamie Hamilton encouraged him to write his own life story and said he was enthusiastic to publish it. Writing The Moon’s a Balloon was to prove to be a long and difficult process for David who, despite wanting desperately to be a successful author, found the process of writing harder than acting. He was almost relieved to set aside work on his book every time he took off to make another film. Two years after he started writing his memoir, Hamilton wrote to him asking how the book was coming along and Niven admitted it was not coming on at all well.
His friends, his two daughters, his painting and his films – as bad as many of those films were – were the things that made Niven happy but Hjördis was bringing him nothing but misery. ‘I had been thinking again about divorcing her but things improved when we had the girls,’ he said in 1980. ‘Friends have often said I should just leave her, but they don’t know how fragile she is. I wanted to leave her often but I thought that if I did it would not only destroy her but perhaps the girls as well. There was no way out. Now, I think it’s till death do us part.’
Hjördis’s health deteriorated further. She said,
I had blackouts. I was told they were epileptic fits. I was so scared of having a fit that I preferred to just stay at home. I could swim and I liked to paint. But I was in fear of blacking out. People thought I blacked out because I drank heavily, but one of the reasons I drank so much was to stop the fits. Richard Burton had fits and he told me that alcohol helped to stop them. So I drank more.
I took lovers. I was sick and tired of David’s infidelity. I didn’t want him to make love to me, but I needed to have intimacy. I shut him out. We were our own worse enemies to each other.
I have to say, though, he was a wonderful father. Not perfect, no father is perfect. What he did for the children was buy them presents, make them laugh when he was with them. But he was away a lot making movies.
David admitted that he had once harboured thoughts that Hjördis might actually solve all their problems for them both by dying. ‘I was convinced that she would kill herself, and then I wouldn’t have to divorce her. Isn’t that terrible, to think that? But you do think terrible things when life is so bad.’
She made an attempt to be a good mother to her girls. She said she knew she fell far short, but she tried. ‘I played games with my girls. I played gin rummy and canasta with Kristina. I think I made them laugh. Kristina understands my sense of humour.
‘I used to wear a little disc around my neck that said I was allergic to penicillin. So I had it engraved, “I am always allergic to penicillin and sometimes also to my husband.” It was a joke. Some laughed. Some gasped in horror.’
She gladly credited David as being the parent who successfully raised the girls, and she had accepted, by 1986, that her daughters may even have grown to hate her.
I can understand if they feel I wasn’t a good mother. I tried not to let my illness concern them. I had trouble showing my love to my girls. I had trouble being intimate with them. David was able to hug and kiss them. I had trouble being intimate with my own children.
When the girls went to school, David took them and collected them. I wanted to, but I couldn’t get out of the house. When Kristina was older she tried to get me to go out with her. Just to get out of the house. To go and have lunch. But I got more and more frightened of leaving the house.
I know you shouldn’t play favourites, and I do love both my girls. But I think Kristina understood me more, and perhaps I felt that because she had David’s blood she was almost my own. It’s very painful now for me to think how I could have done everything better. I just have to accept things. I’m a recovering alcoholic and I have forgiven David for all he did – and I’m trying to forgive myself.
In March 1969 David made a concerted effort to concentrate on his book by taking a break from films. Jamie Hamilton was delighted with the first two chapters but progress was slow and there was little more to read by November when David flew to England to make a film that ended up being cancelled because of industrial unrest at the British film studios. Convinced his film career was at an end, he spent the winter at Château d’Oex writing.
In April 1970 he flew to Rome to film The Statue. He played a professor whose wife, a sculptress, produces a huge statue of him but with genitals which are not his, and so he sets about trying to find out who they belong to. ‘Not for prudes, but a fast-moving package of fun,’ wrote William Hall in London’s Evening News. The Daily Express disagreed; ‘I am happy to say that David Niven looks thoroughly uncomfortable about the whole sorry business.’
He wasn’t uncomfortable at all. He told me, ‘I had fun mak
ing it. I always try to have fun, otherwise what would be the point? If people go to see it and enjoy it, that’s a bonus.’
Throughout 1970 Jamie Hamilton urged him to finish the book, but he still hadn’t completed it when he came to London later in the year, which was when I first met him. He didn’t even mention the book to me and when I reminded him of that some years later, he said, ‘I didn’t think it was worth mentioning because I wasn’t at all sure I would ever finish it.’
I did find out about it, however, when my managing director Ron Lee read the transcript of the lengthy interview I had done with him and thought it could be the basis of a book. In reply to Ron Lee’s letter asking if he would object if I wrote his biography, David very kindly wrote, ‘I would have been delighted to give my permission if it wasn’t for the fact that someone far less creative and yet infuriatingly lazy is already at it as we speak. To be frank, me!’
David later told me that he was convinced that his autobiography was doomed because he thought it was incredibly dull. Jamie Hamilton didn’t think so; he wrote to David to tell him that everyone in his office who had read the finished chapters thought it was hilarious and entertaining. Showbiz columnist Roddy Mann even convinced his own literary agent, George Greenfield, to take Niven on as a client. David, who had once been insecure as an actor, was now highly insecure as an author.
George Greenfield discovered that Cresset Press, who published Round the Rugged Rocks, had the first option to buy his next book. Greenfield wrote to Cresset, telling them he was Niven’s agent and that Niven had written a very long manuscript, written by hand, full of rambling reminiscences, and asked if Cresset wanted to read it. They said they didn’t, leaving the way open for Jamie Hamilton to publish it.
