So I went on ahead and met Marion Marshall in Rome. Marion had divorced Stanley Donen and had two wonderful sons, Josh and Peter, as well as a magnificent apartment in Rome. I was immediately enthralled with Marion and her boys, and very soon we had a life together.
Marion was a year older than I was, and she had been a successful model before she got to Fox around the same time as Marilyn Monroe. When Marion married Stanley Donen in 1952, she quit acting to raise their two kids—Peter, who was born in 1953, and Josh, who came along two years later. The marriage broke up in 1959.
Marion was the right woman for me at the right time, and she gave me a lot. For one thing, she began to heal the wounds left by the divorce from Natalie. For another thing, my friends told me that she gave me an international quality that hadn’t been there before. She was a refining influence in matters of clothes and attitude.
And magically, things started to happen in a positive way for me, which was certainly a switch from the last couple of years. Besides my new love for Marion, Josh and Peter became my sons every way but legally. And a wonderful, empathetic agent named Carol Levi began handling me. Carol was based in the William Morris office in Rome and understood exactly what I wanted from the next phase of my career.
Carol helped get me cast in The Condemned of Altona, a fine picture with Sophia Loren directed by the great Vittorio De Sica. The Condemned of Altona was based on a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Vittorio was without question one of the best directors in the world. I was back doing what I wanted to do: making good pictures, working with great directors.
Years before we did the De Sica picture, I had met Sophia Loren when she came over to Fox after shooting Boy on a Dolphin in Europe and the studio set up a publicity event for her. Buddy Adler was running the studio then, and we were all supposed to toast her for the cameras, but I had neglected to get a glass of champagne. Sophia promptly handed me her glass. A small thing, but I would learn that Sophia is more than an actress, she is a woman of true graciousness. She sees more than her reflection in the mirror; she sees the people around her and acts accordingly.
There’s a famous still of Sophia looking askance at Jayne Mansfield’s breasts. That picture was taken at Romanoff’s. I was on my way there when I passed Jayne in her car. Her window was down, and she was applying rouge to her nipples. I knew her, so I stopped the car. “Looking good!” I said, but what I really wanted to know was what the hell was she doing? It turned out to be a setup to draw attention away from Sophia, who was the hot new girl in town. It worked, for that one night, but Sophia had the career that Jayne could only dream about.
During The Condemned of Altona, I fell madly in love with Sophia. Who wouldn’t? Most nights she would cook for me, and on top of everything else she’s a splendid cook. She was very loyal to Carlo Ponti, although I understand she had an affair with Cary Grant during The Pride and the Passion. Sophia had never had a father in her life—her own father disappeared when she was quite young—and Carlo had found her at a very young age and carefully built her career, and she wasn’t about to betray him. I could certainly appreciate that loyalty; I could also respect it. Sophia mostly lives in Switzerland now, but we talk all the time.
As much as I adored Sophia and Vittorio De Sica, I grew to detest Maximilian Schell. He’d won the Oscar for best actor the year before for Judgment at Nuremberg, and he was enthralled with his own accomplishments. Of course, Sophia had also won an Oscar, for Two Women, but you would never have known it. Her attitude was that of a professional going to work—no more, no less.
The night before we shot a crucial scene, Schell came to my hotel room and gave me a big talk about our playing brothers and how we had to get into the essence of the scene we would be shooting. The next day Schell was behind the camera giving me the off-camera lines for my close-ups, and the entire time I was acting he was shaking his head.
Brothers, my ass!
It was stunningly unprofessional, not to mention calculatingly rude, and the first and only time I’ve ever seen anybody pull anything like that. What was really upsetting him was the fact that Sophia and I were very close, and he didn’t like that.
Schell’s rudeness became his modus operandi; one day, when he was doing a scene with Sophia, he asked me to leave the set because he found my presence disconcerting. We were in Livorgno at the time, and I seriously thought about taking a club to his head, but Carlo Ponti talked me out of it. Of course, Schell being Schell, on those occasions when I’ve run into him in later years, he’s all over me with phony bonhomie. “Oh, darling, it’s so good to see you”—total showbiz bullshit.
I had been looking forward to working with Fredric March, an actor I had admired tremendously for years, even when he was desperately trying to steal scenes, as with his furiously fanning himself in Inherit the Wind. Unfortunately, Freddy was a bit disappointing. If you asked Freddy about a picture he’d made twenty years before, he’d reach into his pocket, pull out a little card that had a complete list of his credits, and refresh his memory. He was very much the Master Thespian, and he gave Vittorio De Sica fits.
Freddy was playing a character based on the founder of the Krupp munitions dynasty, and the picture opened with his character being given a fatal cancer diagnosis. Every day Vittorio would tell him, “Freddy, do not play self-pity. Do not fall into that trap.” And every single day Freddy would play self-pity and Vittorio would have to pull him out of it.
Freddy had a reputation of being incredibly, tastelessly bold with women, and the reputation was completely deserved. It was a remnant of the early part of the century, when leading men sleeping with their leading lady was practically contractual. Once he reached over to look at a brooch Marion was wearing, and he very obviously copped a feel of her left breast while pretending to admire her jewelry. The man was sixty-five years old, but he would have fucked mud if someone had held it for him.
Spencer Tracy had worked with Freddy on Inherit the Wind, and when I got back to Hollywood, I asked Spence about him. All he would say was, “He wouldn’t put down that fucking fan.”
But Freddy had been around for nearly forty years and picked up a lot of experience along the way. He gave me some good political advice. The company was planning to shoot in East Germany, and the American embassy didn’t want American citizens going across into a Communist country. Freddy took me aside and told me, “Look, you don’t want to be lumped in with Vittorio and Abby Mann and the rest of these left-wing guys. It’s a stigma; it won’t do you any good.” On balance, he was probably right. Freddy had been a man of the left all his life and had gotten into some trouble during the blacklist era because of it. He was thoughtfully trying to save me from trouble I really didn’t need.
In contrast to Max Schell, Vittorio De Sica couldn’t have been warmer or more welcoming. During production, he would stand right next to the lens so that he could see what the camera was seeing. He let me watch him work in the editing room and took me completely under his wing. One day he showed me a scene he had shot where I was on camera left and I didn’t have enough authority. “See,” he said, “be on the right side. And be more powerful. I want you to drop your voice.” And he put his hand on my chest, where my voice needed to be placed. Vittorio sent me to Professor Scurri, who helped me get away from the California voice I had been struggling with for a decade. And Vittorio reshot the offending scene, to much better results.
To be in Rome in the early 1960s was to be in the middle of an atmosphere of luxurious creativity. It was palpably alive, in the same way London would be a few years later. There was absolutely nothing about Rome I didn’t like—the people, the piazzas, the entire Italian attitude toward life. The Italians work in order to live, not the other way around.
The premiere of The Condemned of Altona was in Milan, and the picture was very well done and received fantastic reviews. When the movie premiered, Sophia insisted that I escort her. I remain proud of the picture—the European version. In America, Fox lost its nerve an
d edited the picture severely, and most of the atmosphere and all of the quality disappeared. A few years later, Fox would do the same thing to Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, which contained a performance by Burt Lancaster that was truly majestic—a career performance. It was a better picture than ours, but by the time the studio had finished cutting and redubbing it, the magic was gone—just as with The Condemned of Altona.
From working with Vittorio De Sica, my next picture was with Blake Edwards. Marion and I were in Paris when we ran into Blake, and Blake promptly cast me in his new picture. Then John Foreman came over to Rome, and I was once again in a family atmosphere, where I’ve always been happiest.
It was June 1962, and Marion and I were in Rome. One night we were having dinner at the Hostaria dell’Orso, when Natalie and Warren walked in. It was one of those moments that can be classified as awkward, with the potential to become excruciating. Generally speaking, the movies do these scenes better than life.
The conversation was polite and stilted—“How’s your mother?” “Fine, how’s yours?” “Fine.” After the exchange of pleasantries was over, we looked at each other.
“Miss you,” I said.
“Miss you too.”
Both Marion and Warren were standing there while we had our little moment. Maybe they minded. I don’t really know, and I guess I don’t really care. Neither of us could say what we were feeling, but there was a strong vibe in the air, and I could sense she was just as aware of it as I was. Afterward, I dropped Marion off at her apartment, went back to my place, and sat down and wrote Natalie a letter. I told her how much I valued our relationship; I told her that she would always be in my heart.
As soon as I was finished, I went back to her hotel—the Grand. I stood there, scanning the building, wondering which room was hers, hoping I’d see her outline against the shades. Finally, I went in and handed the letter to the concierge and told him to give it to Miss Wood. He walked over and put it in her mailbox. I went back to my apartment, and first thing the next morning I went back to the Grand. She had checked out early. The letter was still in the mailbox, unopened.
Over the next eight years, we would run into each other a number of times, although that was the only time it happened when I was in Europe. These moments were always intense—it was as if everybody else in the room froze and the sound died away and we were the only two people still moving, talking, and breathing.
TWELVE
“I HAVE A FROZEN COCK.”
With David Niven and my friend and publicist George Kirvay, at David’s house at St. Jean-Cap Ferrat in the south of France. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
If you loved David Niven—and everybody did, with the tragic exception of his second wife—you called him “Niv.” I had first met Niv years before, on Bogart’s yacht, the Santana, and we immediately struck up a friendship. Later, when he was having an affair with that wonderful woman and actress Deborah Kerr, Natalie and I spent a great deal of time with both of them. So the Cortina d’Ampezzo location of The Pink Panther was as much a reunion as it was a film set.
I loved David. I loved the way he lived his life. I loved the way he left Hollywood and went to Europe, which was one of the reasons I did the same thing. And when we met up in Europe, David became another mentor for me. He took me to his tailor, he took me to his shirtmaker. David dressed in Turnbull and Asser, not to mention Schifanelli. He would put on a gorgeous dress shirt and roll the cuffs back—a marvelous sense of style, elegant and casual at the same time. Along with Marion, he helped give me a new style for my new life, and at a time when my confidence had flagged, he worked hard to give me a sense of my own possibilities.
Now, at Cortina d’Ampezzo, there was a chairlift that went up to the top of the mountain, with a restaurant at the top. The height went from two thousand feet to eight thousand feet, and it was a beautiful place. One day in particular began with stunning weather, so David and I went up the mountain to have lunch. We were dressed casually in slacks, but once we got up there, the bad weather moved in, and it got cold. Really cold.
As we came down after lunch, Niv was sitting in the chairlift saying very matter-of-factly, “My cock is frozen. I have a frozen cock. Frozen solid.” When we got down to the hotel and bar, Marion was waiting for us. David explained his predicament and asked Marion to sit on his lap and save the life of his favorite friend. Having a strong maternal disposition, Marion sat in his lap and saved a very valuable part of David’s life.
Niv ordered a brandy. And then he told me to follow him, and we went into the john, where he unzipped and dropped his unit into the brandy snifter to try to save it from frostbite. I was staring at something I never imagined on the eleventh hole at Bel-Air.
It was at that point that the bathroom door swung open, and in came a man in a military uniform. And he looked at David with his cock in a brandy glass, and me staring at it, and stopped dead, with a stunned look on his face. At which point Niv looked up and said, “I always give it a little drink from time to time.”
I just fell over laughing and was so hysterical I literally wet my pants. From that day on, Niv always referred to Marion as the family bird-warmer because she had sat on his lap and warmed him up.
He was a special, special man.
Niv specialized in a smooth, blithe manner and an authentic wit and joie de vivre. Beneath that was a lot of pain that he worked very hard not to let anybody see. It wasn’t that he was protective of himself; I think he thought that there was quite enough misery in the world, and he saw no reason to add more.
After David came back from the war, during which he helped plan the raid on Dieppe and was attached, among other places, to Montgomery’s army, he resumed his career in Hollywood. On May 19, 1946, he and his wife, Primmie, were at a party at Tyrone Power’s house. Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Patricia Medina, and Richard Greene were also there. Soon after they started to play a hide-and-seek game called “Sardines” that had to be played in the dark, there was a terrible thud. Ty Power put the lights on, and everybody realized that Primmie had mistaken the basement door for the bathroom door and taken a terrible fall down the stairs—twenty feet, headfirst. She was at the bottom of the basement steps, unconscious.
They got her up the stairs, and while they waited for the ambulance, Primmie opened her eyes and said, “I feel so strange…even when I had babies I never felt so….” And then she closed her eyes. “We’ll never be invited again,” she said. Primmie died two days later, at the age of twenty-eight. David was left with his two boys, David Jr., who was three and a half, and Jamie, who was six months old.
People who knew David at the time said he was completely devastated. David would talk about how he loved her, how cruel it was, and how he was never happy again. Clark Gable, who had lost Carole Lombard in a plane crash in 1942, when she was just thirty-three and they had only been married three years, helped him through it, just as in time David would help me.
Part of the reason David was always in some secret pain was his second marriage, a year and a half after Primmie died, to a woman named Hjordis Genberg. It was a classic rebound mistake, made partially because David didn’t want to marry any of the actresses who pursued him relentlessly after Primmie died. I think he wanted a wife for himself and a mother for the boys.
Hjordis was quite beautiful, but that’s a genetic accident; for the qualities that stem from character, she hadn’t had as much luck. Niv’s eventual nickname for her was “Nej,” which is pronounced “Nay,” and is Swedish for “no,” which she said all the time. Perhaps the early years were good, but by the time I met David in the mid-1950s, he was having affairs, as was Hjordis, who was also emptying a lot of bottles in the bargain.
David’s method for coping with all this was to pretend that nothing was wrong. He was a good, involved father, allowing for the fact that he was a successful actor and away making movies a lot. Otherwise, he was very concerned about his boys’ future and welfare.
David met Deborah Kerr w
hen they were making Bonjour Tristesse, and they immediately had a great simpatico. They were the most wonderful couple I ever spent time with. They had the same sense of humor, the same sense of effortless continental style, and together they were a joy. Besides Deborah, the location of the Preminger movie exposed David to the Côte d’Azur, and he fell in love with that as well. A couple of years later, he bought his villa at Cap Ferrat, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Sometimes a hit has a tangible feel to it, because you’re having so much fun, and The Pink Panther was like that. Blake Edwards was a very spontaneous director, and extraordinarily gifted. Blake loved Laurel and Hardy, as did I; the essence of their comedy was the idea that the buildup to the joke is as important as the joke. A deliberate rhythm can make a joke much funnier than rushing to the punch line. Watching Blake gently impose that rhythm on his actors was one of the joys of making The Pink Panther.
Blake would arrive on the set and announce, “All right, let’s rehearse. Let’s try this. You do that. See if that works.” The dialogue was on paper, but Blake rehearsed a great deal, as you have to with physical comedy. And he shot a lot of takes. The mood was elevated, very happy, so it was a pleasure to work with him. When Peter Sellers replaced Peter Ustinov—Blake had wanted Sellers from the beginning—and the two of them started to work on Inspector Clouseau, there was such a feeling of creation. It was no slipshod thing—it was magical!
The only blight on the great experience of The Pink Panther occurred during a sequence when I was hiding in the bathtub with Capucine. The scene called for me to emerge from beneath the suds and between her legs, but the prop man first had to create the suds, which is hard to do under bright lights. He told me he had used baby detergent, but he had actually used the strongest detergent he could find. It burned and lacerated my eyes, it burned Capucine’s vagina, and it burned her under her arms.
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