by Michael Munn
David finished the book at the end of February 1971 and was rewarded with a cheque for £7,500 as an advance on royalties. Although the book was very entertaining, it needed a lot of editorial work. Whole chunks were cut, which David objected to, but several years later, David told me that if it hadn’t been for a man called Roger Machell who edited the book, ‘it would never have been the success it is.’
The book’s title, The Moon’s a Balloon, had no relevance to anything in the book but was simply a line from a poem by E.E. Cummings which begins, ‘Who knows if the moon’s a balloon?’ It simply appealed to him.
He got back to his main career, acting, and starred with Gina Lollobrigida in King, Queen, Knave as a husband and wife who take in his teenage nephew, played by John Moulder Brown. The young man and his stepmother become lovers and together they plan to murder the uncle. The film, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, was admired by some critics. ‘It would have been hard to predict that David Niven, Gina Lollobrigida and John Moulder Brown would have teamed so brilliantly in Skolimowski’s idiosyncratic style of farce,’ said the Times. The Observer thought it was ‘made with grace and style’. But it didn’t appeal to the public and became another of Niven’s obscure films.
The Moon’s a Balloon was published in October 1971 at which time Niven attended a launch party for book critics, columnists and booksellers but spent most of his time talking to the booksellers because he knew they were the ones he needed to impress the most. He had them roaring with laughter at his stories and they went away determined the book would be a best seller.
The reviews were literally raves, but it was his TV appearance on the Michael Parkinson Show, which I went to, that sealed the book’s success. The next day sales rocketed and the book was reprinted. It stayed at number one on the bestseller lists for weeks and was reprinted again.
He was eager to write another book but he was adamant that it would be a novel. However, G.P. Putnam, who published The Moon’s a Balloon in America, urged him to write a second memoir, detailing the golden age of Hollywood. They offered him a large advance to do so which he accepted and so began writing Bring on the Empty Horses. He told me he only accepted Putnam’s offer because he wanted the money.
Now he was a successful author and told me when we met up in 1971, ‘I think being an author has brought me more satisfaction than being an actor ever did.’
While he had great joy as an author, he had great misery in his marriage. After I first met Hjördis on the second day I spent with David in 1970, he told me, quite casually, ‘Hjördis has a boyfriend. She’s had a lover for years.’
She made no apology about taking a lover. She said, ‘What was the point of not having a lover? Our marriage was a sham. Our marriage was a mistake. It didn’t work well from the start. David suffocated me. He couldn’t help being who he was. He couldn’t help it if girls threw themselves at him.’
‘But he could have resisted,’ I said. ‘There are some Hollywood stars who have stayed faithful.’
She laughed and said, ‘Tell me who they are. I will marry them.’
David was now earning more money than he had ever done. The royalties from The Moon’s a Balloon were rolling in, he had a good advance for Bring on the Empty Horses, and he earned £40,000 in 1972 for making a series of TV commercials for a Japanese deodorant. His usual fee to make a film was around $200,000.
He was also much in demand as a speaker and gave a series of lectures in America in October 1972 which not only earned him good money but also continued to boost sales of his book.
Christmas of 1972 was a sad one. Noël Coward had died on 26 March that year, and the joy he brought to the Nivens each Boxing Day was gone forever. Said Hjördis, ‘We were so fond of Noël. His wit and charm made each Boxing Day special. Without him, it was empty.’
The next time I saw David was in April 1973, when he came to London to promote the paperback edition of The Moon’s a Balloon with a second appearance on the Michael Parkinson Show. I was again fortunate to be in the audience, and I met David the next day for lunch. I was still a publicist at Cinerama with aspirations to do greater things, and he encouraged me, ‘Be a writer. There’s nothing to it.’ I told him I was, having worked with Sheridan Morley on a script for John Huston. That impressed David no end, and I think from then he had a high regard for me.
I saw him again in London in July of that year when he was making Vampira, a horror spoof in which he played Count Dracula. I hung around the set for a few days at David’s invitation, watching him for the first time at work as an actor. He was always smiling, making people laugh, and generally enjoying the whole experience. He would arrive each morning and say good morning to everyone – not just actors but all the crew. That impressed me.
On the set David found a use for me. He nearly always rewrote his dialogue simply to make his lines more suited to his style of delivery – something a lot of actors do – but he was having trouble with some lines so he asked me to help. I made some suggestions and he was delighted with them. He got me to do the same for him later on Candleshoe, AMan Called Intrepid and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square because he came to trust me as someone with an ear for his style of delivery.
In between takes on the Vampira set, he talked to me about his children whom he had not really mentioned much before. Kristina was then 12 and at a Swiss boarding school, Le Rosey. Fiona was eight and at school, of course. David Jnr was 30 and now an executive of Columbia Films in London, which may be why Columbia picked up the distribution rights for Vampira, a film nobody else wanted to release. Jamie was 22 and finding success at an investment company in New York. ‘So far David is the only one who’s gone into this awful business,’ Niven said.
‘The girls still might,’ I suggested.
‘I hope to God not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I know the kind of men they’d meet in this business. Men like me.’
I worked on the publicity of Vampira because when it finally got a release in 1974, I was at Columbia-Warner which was distributing the film in the UK. The director of publicity for Columbia asked me if I could pull some strings and get Niven to come and promote the film. I tried but David said, ‘The film is a dud, of course, like all of them are now. I’m really too busy writing.’ And I couldn’t blame him.
I suggested to the publicity director he try talking to David Jnr but it turned out he had moved on to Paramount by then.
For Christmas 1973 David took the family on a holiday to Kenya. It was, Hjördis later told me, an effort to get her into a totally different environment where she might stop, or cut down, drinking, and get over her agoraphobia. But neither illness is that easy to overcome.
In January 1974, Sam Goldwyn died, aged 91. The news hit David hard, despite the many battles he had had with him. It also made David acutely aware of his own mortality. Hjördis recalled, ‘Noël Coward died and then Sam Goldwyn died. It scared David. He said he couldn’t even bear to think about dying. He said, “I’ve more years behind me than I have ahead.”’
In July he returned to England to appear in a television production of The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. It was recorded in Bristol for Harlech Television. Then he went straight to Malaysia to make a film, Paper Tiger, playing a teacher of English on a Pacific island whose only pupil is the young son of the Japanese ambassador. Niven’s character claims to have had a distinguished military past which has resulted in a damaged leg. But when he and the boy are kidnapped by a guerrilla group, he proves to be a fake. He does, however, summon up the courage in the end to save the boy in what turns out to be the one true heroic moment in his life.
Paper Tiger was filmed in Kuala Lumpur, in the Genting Highlands of Malaysia, and Malacca over a long and tiring 10 week schedule. He arrived in Kuala Lumpur accompanying a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he had gallantly rescued from a groping passenger on board the aeroplane. Apparently, David actually hit the man, or maybe he just pushed him back into his seat
. Whatever the actual truth, the stewardess accepted her hero’s invitation to join him in his suite at the Hilton Hotel.
The film was directed by Ken Annakin who I interviewed in London when Paper Tiger opened in 1975. He told me, ‘David Niven was the very first choice for the role of the teacher. It’s very much the sort of character that he played in Separate Tables, and the moment he read the script he jumped at it. I personally think he’s a marvellous actor. We were very lucky in having one of the nicest and most co-operative actors in the world today, and that set the standard so that everybody behaved well.’
Annakin was also lucky to get the great Japanese star Toshiro Mifune to play the ambassador, and he found a small Japanese boy, Ando, to play the pupil who hero-worships his English teacher. Annakin said, ‘Every evening at around seven o’clock, David spent an hour with Ando, who couldn’t speak a word of English at the start, teaching him to play games which helped Ando to learn some English and to be comfortable with David. I don’t know of any other actor who would have bothered to do that, and Ando became devoted to David, and you can see that in the film.’
David spent some of his free time working on his new book. When he went off to film in the jungle of the Genting Highlands he left all his notes and diaries he was using for the book in the production office at the Holiday Inn in Kuala Lumpur. A fire broke out, the production office burned down and David lost all his notes and diaries. He hadn’t enjoyed the location at all, but this was the last straw. He told me, ‘It was the most miserable two months I can remember ever making a picture.’
There were compensations, though. He was paid $250,000 to make the film, and he enjoyed the company of a number of young ladies. Ken Annakin told me, ‘About two days before we were due to finish filming, his back went and he collapsed in agony. When he got home he told Hjördis that he had hurt his back when I made him climb up mountains. We never made him climb any mountains. I know why his back went!’
David turned in one of his very best performances. He said, ‘It was an easy part for me. All my life I’ve been pretending to be other people.’ The critics were divided in their opinion. Patrick Gibbs wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘I was left feeling strongly that of all the cards Mr Niven holds, pathos is not one of them.’
In the Daily Mail Margaret Hinxman wrote, ‘Niven’s elegance and style make you feel the character is not a nonsense, but a man at odds with a conscience the existence of which he had long forgotten.’
Tom Hutchinson of the Sunday Telegraph didn’t like the film but did like Niven. ‘What saves it all from absolute tepidity is David Niven’s portrayal as Bradbury with a quotation for every situation and an excuse for every possible danger. The wary eye beneath the forehead’s corrugations tells us the man has lived life at second-hand but would hate to be thought as second-rate. It is a satisfying example of combined star-quality and acting skill.’
It’s a film worth catching solely because of Niven’s performance, and if not taken as anything more than a simple-minded adventure yarn suitable for a family audience, the movie works well.
David came back to London in October 1974 with Hjördis, and I was invited for lunch. Hjördis said she remembered me from our first brief meeting in 1970 and tried making a joke: ‘I’m glad to see that David’s friends are getting younger and are not always girls.’
David said to me later, ‘She meant that most of my friends are old or dying or dead.’
I said, ‘Yes, I realised.’
‘She has trouble sometimes making herself understood because she thinks in Swedish and when it comes out in English the words are not always quite right. It’s her jokes, mainly. They go down like lead balloons with some people.’
When we had some time alone, David asked me, ‘Did you notice her eyes?’
‘In what way?’
‘She was flirting with you.’
‘She was?’
‘Didn’t you notice?’
I said, ‘I thought her eyes made her look like she was stoned.’
‘She probably was. Sedatives, old bean. I think she looks at men and flirts but she says it’s the pills that make her do that.’
I couldn’t honestly say if she was flirting with me – I certainly hadn’t felt that she was – but I had noticed that she looked sedated.
From London they went to Leeds to attend a charity ball organised by Roger Moore. Hjördis remembered it as an example of how her sense of humour generally bombed. ‘The MC was on stage, and he said, “We are all very grateful to David Niven who has come all this way even though he is so busy. So I said, “What about me? I’ve come too.” Some laughed. Some gasped. I could never win.’
Many of David’s friends were urging him to leave her but he had made up his mind that was not an option. He told me, ‘If I left her, she’d be a drunk in the gutter. I used to leave leaflets from Alcoholics Anonymous around the house. I hoped she’d get the message. She didn’t.’
He continued to have numerous love affairs and rented a flat in London to carry them out. I went there in 1975 and met a beautiful woman in her 20s. David tried to encourage me to have affairs also, even though I had been married for only two years. I told him it was out of the question. He said, ‘But it’s essential. You’ll see. In time it will get boring and you’ll need to find a little adventure with other girls.’
I didn’t share his philosophy but I never criticised him for it. With David, you just accepted that’s what he was like. I thought it was terribly sad to see his marriage in such a state but, frankly, it was now completely unfixable.
In March 1975 he finally finished Bring on the Empty Horses which was less a memoir and more of a book of insights and anecdotes about stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It was written as he would have spoken it, like a superb raconteur who was an insider rather than an observer.
Roger Machell at Hamilton did a great deal of work editing the manuscript before it was published. David had resisted changes to The Moon’s a Balloon and he resisted even harder with this book. He talked about his frustration over the editing of the book when I interviewed him in 1979. ‘I sweated blood writing the damn thing. You invest so much into it, and then they tell you that they need to change things. It’s soul destroying at times, it really is. They make you feel as though you’re a terrible writer and that they have to make you look better than you are.’
Unwilling to wait for film work that might never come, David went to Africa, Mexico and Nepal to make two documentaries, Around the World and one for the Survival TV series. He also provided his voice talents for a cartoon, The Remarkable Rocket.
In July 1975, just as he must have been thinking that there wouldn’t be another film to follow Paper Tiger, he went to Hollywood to make a Disney production, No Deposit, No Return, a comedy thriller in which he played a millionaire whose two grandchildren are kidnapped.
He didn’t much enjoy working for Disney and told me four years later, ‘The ghost of Walt must haunt the place. Everyone is still afraid of him even though he’s been dead for years. Every time I made a suggestion to the director, he said, “Oh no, Walt wouldn’t have liked that.” It was impossible.’
The director, Norman Tokar, might have done well to listen to Niven’s suggestion. Like most of Disney’s live action films of the 1970s, it was tedious and, at 112 minutes, overlong. Philip French, writing in The Times, said, ‘Once again one is left wondering why there should be such an unbridgeable gulf between the brilliant professionalism and sometimes innovative genius of the Disney animated films, and the dull artlessness of the majority of their live-action pictures.’
David was glad to get home in time to see Fiona join Kristina at Le Rosey in September. Later that month he flew to England to promote Bring on the Empty Horses and again appeared on the Michael Parkinson Show which again I watched live – it was an hysterical show and was much talked about. David was now better known as a raconteur and an author than he was for his films. I don’t think he minded that too much,
but he was hurt by one review of Paper Tiger from Russell Davies of the Observer who wrote, ‘David Niven’s recent book has saved him from relegation to the battered figurine department, making his shabby-genteel presence about as well known now as it ever has been.’
He was further hurt by poor reviews of the new book in Britain. It was, said Graham Lord in the Sunday Express ‘something of a disappointment’. He was better served by the American critics. Bill Buckely of the New York Times wrote, ‘This might easily be the best book ever written about Hollywood.’ The book sold a million and a half copies in two weeks and was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 18 weeks.
Hjördis came in for a lot of criticism from David’s friends because she never read his books. She told me, ‘Why did I need to? I knew all the stories. I’d heard them all a hundred times.’
I told her that I knew David had felt terribly rejected.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I should have read them. But when you live with a man who tells everyone the same stories, and you have become bored hearing them, you can’t read them as well. But I should have read his books because I was his wife. But there again, that is the thing – I was just his wife. I think people like Jack Hawkins and Roger Moore were very lucky because their wives were happy to be who they were. That is good for them. It wasn’t good for me.
‘But, oh God, I should have read his books. It would have been no great sacrifice.’
CHAPTER 22
—
No Reprieve
At the end of September David flew to Hollywood to appear with a starry cast in Murder by Death, a really good crime spoof written by Neil Simon. Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith and Peter Falk played characters all based on famous literary crime fighters such as Miss Marple, Philip Marlow and Hercule Poirot. I liked it, but not many critics did. Dilys Powell wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘It seems to me that if you haven’t watched the real Thin Man and the real Bogie in the real Maltese Falcon you won’t see the joke; and if you have watched them, the joke is not good enough.’
