David Niven

by Michael Munn

  David Jnr produced another film in which his father starred, Ménage à Trois which was retitled Better Late Than Never. It was a good comedy about an elderly cabaret star, played by David, now trying to make a living in a strip club in the South of France. It was filmed close to Lo Scoglietto, but somehow David managed to get a living allowance on top of his fee of $150,000.

  When the studio saw the rushes and heard how slurred Niven’s voice had become, they told the film’s director, Bryan Forbes, to have it dubbed. To Forbes’ eternal credit, he refused, knowing it would be a humiliation to David.

  In October David went to London for the publication of Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly. He again appeared on the Michael Parkinson Show–this time I wasn’t in the audience but I remember watching it on TV and being shocked at how slurred his voice had become. I knew he wasn’t drunk because he never got noticeably drunk.

  Jamie also saw the programme and became concerned that something was seriously wrong with his father and called him by telephone, urging him to go to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis for a thorough medial examination. David flew to the States and checked himself in. He was there for several days.

  His PR people at Theo Cowan’s office called me to let me know he was due back in London and asked if I’d like to interview him. Of course, I said yes. The day before the interview was due to take place, I got a call to say it had been cancelled and I was confidentially tipped off that David was actually unwell. That was enough for me to call the Connaught Hotel and speak directly to him, and he said to come on over in the morning. I did, and there he told me the grim news.

  He had been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. ‘It’s going to kill me, Mike,’ he said. His voice was quavering as well as slurred.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be too nice,’ he said.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes while he collected himself. Then he ordered coffee which I had to decline because I had by then become a Mormon and couldn’t drink coffee. He knew a bit about Mormons. He had been to Salt Lake City and was welcomed by the Mormon President there. ‘Nice people,’ he said. And then he talked a bit about the old days, and about his problems with Hjördis. Then he asked me, ‘Any chance you could convert Hjördis? Maybe that would stop her drinking.’

  I tried to say the right things but it’s difficult when a friend has just told you he has a death sentence from which there seems no reprieve.

  However, I’d brought him a present. It was a copy of my first book – about epic films. I’d even signed it. He said how wonderful that I’d become a published author and that we were both ‘in the same club’. He flicked through the pages. It really wasn’t well written but fortunately it was highly illustrated and he loved looking at the photographs. He would say, ‘Ah, Gable as Rhett Butler. Nobody else could have played that part. Lots of Chuck Heston I see. Well, he was Moses and Ben-Hur, wasn’t he? Nobody else could ever be. And here’s me in Around the World In 80 Days. God, I’ve got a bit older since then. Here’s Larry Olivier in a Roman toga. What wonderful memories of Hollywood.’ He thought my book was full of wonderful memories? He was the one who virtually invented the Hollywood memoir.

  As I was about to leave, he asked me to keep his secret. It was one all his journalist friends kept. The public didn’t know for another year.

  CHAPTER 23

  —

  A Life Given Up

  David returned to Switzerland and told Hjördis the terrible news. She recalled, ‘When David told me, I couldn’t speak. I don’t know how it seemed to him. I probably just seemed like I always did. But I was so stunned. It’s hard to remember everything clearly. I had become so drunk most of the time that much of it is a haze.’

  On 18 November 1981 David’s sister Joyce died, aged 81. Every Christmas for many years, David had sent Joyce and Grizel generous cheques. He’d never forgotten to take care of his sisters. Now there was only he and Grizel left from the family.

  Two weeks later he heard the news that Natalie Wood had drowned at sea off Santa Catalina. He had remained friends with Natalie’s husband Robert Wagner, and he called Wagner every day, desperate to help him through the tragedy. He told Wagner to come to Switzerland as soon as he could. Wagner arrived with his children in a snow storm to be greeted personally by David who had organised a chalet for them to stay in.

  In February 1982 he sent his old friend Trubshawe a cheque for £2,000. Trubshawe told me, ‘My wife had Alzheimer’s Disease and I was struggling to care for her. Money wasn’t too good. I wasn’t trying to get David to send me money. I just let him know my wife was ill, and he said he would send me some money. I told him not to, but he insisted. I said I’d think about it, and a week later, knowing I was in trouble, I accepted his offer. It was wonderful of him. That’s when you know you have true friends, even if there has been a great distance between you – physically and emotionally.’

  David’s new novel didn’t sell well, and since his deal with Doubleday was actually for two novels, he had to start thinking about what his next book would be. He decided it would be another novel, this time about a young man who goes to Sandhurst and is sent to serve in Northern Ireland. He wrote by hand and gave up after little more than 40 pages.

  That’s when he decided he would write about the story of an author living in Switzerland who has an affair with a schoolgirl. He managed to write 200 pages but when he abandoned that idea, he came up with the story about an author who does an exhausting tour of America, checks into the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, is diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, and returns to his home on the Côte d’Azur.

  In March 1982 he started to make his last two films, shot back to back. They were Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther. For the first film, Blake Edwards had come up with the dreadful idea of utilising out takes from the previous Clouseau films and bringing back actors such as Niven, Robert Wagner and Capucine to fill in the blanks.

  David was barely able to work at all but he’d promised Blake he would do the films. I didn’t care for either film, and neither did Lynne Frederick who successfully sued Blake Edwards and the producers for using Peter Sellers’ image in the first of the two films without her consent, winning over a million dollars.

  Because David’s voice had deteriorated so much, impressionist Rich Little dubbed his lines. No one thought to tell David this and he found out only when Rich Little spoke about it to the Press.

  I received a letter from David early in 1982 in which he said that he would love it if I could come to visit him, or if not, he would see me the next time he came to London. I hadn’t realised how desperate he was to see me, or why, and I neglected to try to overcome my fear of flying and get over to see him.

  But he did come to London in July and I met with him at his Mayfair flat, recording, at his request, his confessions.

  Regarding everything he said about Hjördis, he told me, ‘I wish you could talk to her. I’m prepared to take responsibility for my part in this disastrous marriage, but I’m sure she could give you a better insight. Of course, my dear chap, she’s never going to be in a fit state to have her say. I think that’s a terrible shame because she is entitled to put her side of the story forward. But she never will, you know. She’s a lost soul and I don’t think she’ll live much longer. Really I don’t.’

  As if I hadn’t had enough shocks, he then said something that came like a bolt out of the blue. ‘Look, old bean, I don’t want to die in agony and without dignity,’ he said. ‘I’m doing everything I can to beat this thing, but none of it is working. I can’t save my own life, but I can take it. And I think I will.’

  He was very matter of fact, very unemotional, and there was even a certain twinkle in his faded eye that, for a moment, made me think he was pulling my leg. I said, ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not in the least, Mike. I’m in deadly earnest. I nearly did it before.’ He said he wasn’t going to try and blow his brains out again. ‘
Awfully messy if it works, but also damned inconvenient when the bloody thing doesn’t work.’

  The he told me his plan. ‘I have a doctor in Switzerland who will give me an injection that will put me gently to sleep. So when I know that I can’t stand any more, when life becomes too unbearable, I’ll exit this world under my own steam. I want control over my life and death. I don’t want this bloody disease to take me. I want it to be my decision.’

  He fell silent. The air in the room was very still. There didn’t even seem to be any traffic noise from outside. I no longer have the religious beliefs I had then, but I do believe that human beings have the capacity to be spiritual, and I am convinced that David was experiencing something very spiritual. He was struggling to defeat something dark and destructive inside of him, battling it with his own incredible will.

  I could see that he wanted to cry but he was holding it in.

  ‘Do you want to pray with me?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes. Very much.’

  ‘Would you like me to give you a blessing?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Then he added, ‘What is that?’

  ‘I’ll place my hands on your head and say a prayer.’

  ‘Is it a healing?’ he asked.

  ‘It might be,’ I said. ‘Just stay sitting in your chair.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. You know, I wasn’t looking forward to getting on my knees. Awfully hard to get down, and when I’m down, damn near impossible to get up again.’

  I stood behind his chair, lay my hands upon his head, and began to pray that he would find the strength to overcome his fears and that, in time, he might have power over his own life, to be able to give it up when he was ready to do so, as Jesus Christ gave up his life on the cross, and as I said that, David lifted one hand and placed it on top of my hands.

  When it was over, he sat quietly for several minutes, and then said, ‘That was one of the most beautiful moments of my life, and I shall never forget it.’

  When it was time for me to leave, we shook hands and he said, ‘I doubt we shall meet again, unless you can come to Switzerland.’ I said I would try to come over. ‘Write to me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll drop a line to you while I can still write.’

  A month later, in August 1982, I read in the newspapers that David was seriously ill; the news had finally broken but it was inaccurate. Princess Grace, in an effort to protect him, had been quoted as saying he had suffered a mild stroke. The public still didn’t know the truth about his disease. I had one tabloid newspaper call me asking for information and I told them I was unaware that David had suffered a stroke. Asked what I thought might be wrong with him, I said, ‘I expect he’s sick and tired of being asked what’s wrong with him.’

  On 14 September Princess Grace died when her car left the road in Monte Carlo and plunged from the Grande Corniche. David desperately wanted to attend her funeral but was afraid that his emotions, now highly fragile, would cause a scene, and so he stayed away.

  Another of his closest friends, Robert Coote, died in New York on 26 November. That month he wrote to me from Château d’Oex and told me about a wonderful Irish nurse, Katherine Matthewson, who was now taking care of him. He had met her while in a London hospital during the late autumn; she was an agency nurse and he decided to hire her. She returned with him to Switzerland and stayed with him to the very end. I think she may have actually been the greatest blessing in his life in his last months. Hjördis was incapable of looking after him. ‘The time when he needed me the most, I wasn’t there for him,’ she told me. ‘When David was ill I had a blackout. It may have been a fit. I fell and broke my leg.’

  Peter Ustinov had nothing but contempt for Hjördis. ‘I think she hated him. Some people aren’t capable of hatred. She was.’

  I said, ‘That doesn’t mean she hated him.’

  ‘She gave a good impression of hatred. She said that here was a man who couldn’t even make himself understood any more. That’s such a cruel thing to say.’

  It was. And she knew it. ‘I said some terrible things,’ she told me. ‘I don’t expect to be forgiven for any of them. I was cruel to David. But that wasn’t who I really was. I had become something else.’

  In December 1982 Hjördis issued a short press release to announce that David was suffering ‘a muscular disorder, but it is not cancer or a heart attack as many people have supposed’.

  David wrote one last time to me to say he had written a letter to Hjördis because he had come to the decision he wanted a divorce and was taking the girls away with him. He said that in his letter he had told her how much he loved her and would to the day he died. But he never gave her the letter because he realised it was a folly to get a divorce now and would accomplish nothing. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I would like to be remembered as one Hollywood actor who never got divorced.’ That meant a lot to him; he never wanted to be a divorcee.

  When I asked Hjördis if she had known of the letter, she said, ‘I had no idea. Oh my God!’ She was shocked and ashamed.

  There was something else he said in his letter to me. ‘You won’t believe this, but I kneel every night to say my prayers. I pray with Katherine who helps me to kneel and then helps me to get up. She has a beautiful faith. You would like her.’

  He continued to work on his novel, but he knew he was failing both because of a lack of inspiration and his growing inability to hold a pen. He managed to complete 50,000 words. He no longer wrote his own letters but dictated them.

  A campaign began among David’s friends to get him a knighthood. At the time, very few actors were knighted, and those that were knighted were usually the giants of British theatre. Niven himself had little regard for honours in the acting world. He once told me, ‘Of course Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson deserved them, but who else can match them?’

  In the event, no knighthood was considered for David, perhaps because he was a tax exile. In more recent years that hasn’t prevented other British actors from getting knighthoods, and today such honours seem to be handed out far less exclusively than they once were. I don’t know if David Niven should have been knighted or if he would have even welcomed it.

  He returned to London one more time in February 1983 for further treatment at the Wellington Hospital at St John’s Wood. I was able to get in to see him simply by putting on an official badge that identified me as ‘Elder Michael Munn of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’, giving me church minister status that allowed me into any hospital at any time.

  I found him in a private room under the name of David Snook. He didn’t say very much – he was very ill and needed rest, so I just sat with him and talked about mundane things; he particularly enjoyed hearing about my three children, one of whom was named after Tony Curtis and another after Natalie Wood. ‘Do you think you’ll name one after me, if you have another boy?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I have a nephew called David and my parents would never forgive me if there were two Davids in the family.’

  He smiled and said, ‘Just don’t name him after Errol. He’d never forgive you being stuck with a name like that.’

  He asked me to tell him about some of the people we both knew and liked – Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Charlton Heston, George Raft, Ava Gardner. He loved hearing gossip and he said, ‘You’ve got some good stories. I’ll use them in my next memoir and say they happened to me.’ I told him he was welcome to.

  He wanted to know who my lovers had been, and while there wasn’t much to tell him on that score, I was able to give him a tale or two that had him pointing to my Elder’s badge and saying, ‘You weren’t always such a saint, were you?’ I took that as a compliment from David Niven.

  Then I told him a favourite story of mine, known as Footprints in the Sand. Paraphrased, as I told it, a man walks along the beach with the Lord, and as he does so, he always sees two sets of footprints in the sand. But when life became difficult he could see only one set of footprints, and he asked the Lord, ‘Why, when
you had told me that you would always walk with me, could I only see one set of footprints?’ The Lord told him, ‘My precious child, I love you and would never leave you. During the times when you were suffering and were in desperation and you saw only one set of footprints, that, my son, was when I was carrying you.’

  David listened. He said nothing but looked very peaceful and then fell asleep. That was my last memory of him.

  He returned to Lo Scoglietto but was no longer able to go to his favourite public places to eat because he had difficulty swallowing. He swam with difficulty every day, and Katherine swam with him. ‘She was wonderful to him,’ Hjördis told me. ‘He would have to wear a rubber ring, and she was with him the whole time in the water.’

  As for her own contribution to his welfare, Hjördis admitted she made none. And her own behaviour towards him was, she said, ‘despicable’. She was fond of a doctor she had met at the Wellington Hospital, and he came to the Niven house in the summer. ‘He was there to help David,’ she said, ‘but he was also there for me. I was selfish. I had a romance with the doctor, and my girls were there in the house, and I don’t think they ever forgave me. I thought that his nurse could do everything for him.’

  During the summer, I received one last and very brief letter from David who surprisingly wrote it by hand so it must have been a painful ordeal for him. He said that he had been blessed to have Katherine and that he was saying his prayers every night. He also said he had found a sense of peace and that he had also been sent a copy of the Footprints in the Sand story by a doctor friend of his. Hjördis told me that he kept it to the end of his life and read it almost every day. He also said that he had decided to take control of his life stating that he was not to be put on a life support machine at any time.

  Among old friends who visited him was Richard Burton. When I was with Burton on the set of 1984, which was the last time I saw Richard, he told me that he had been to see David shortly before he died and was amazed at how David was able to make jokes about his condition. ‘He looked so terrible,’ Rich said, ‘and his voice was very slurred and I had trouble understanding him. He suddenly said, “My dear Richard, I am not deaf so please kindly stop shouting at me.” I hadn’t realised I was shouting.’