by Michael Munn
But behind the wit and the charm, the twinkle in the eye and mischievous manner, and the often impeccable manners was a very different man – someone even his closest friends rarely got to see.
He told me in 1982,
I was often petrified that I would disappoint everyone. I don’t think there was a great deal of substance to me. I was far more insecure than anyone would have realised. That’s why I worked so hard to be liked. If I hadn’t done that I think I would have been a basket case. There were times in my life when terrible depression overcame me, and when it did I had to give in to it. But most of the time I fought off depressing thoughts.
There were two versions of the younger me. There was the poisonous little me who got into trouble and even crime -1 could have easily gone on to become a criminal and would no doubt have been a dismal failure and ended up in prison – and there was the ‘life can’t get me down’ young me charming everyone he could with banter and wit, which is the preferable me. I think because that was the more successful me, it was the one that took over, and thank God for that. Thank God for the people in my life who had the tolerance and patience to put up with me and also to inspire me to want to better myself. Perhaps coming from my background, I could only go in two directions; either become an officer and a gentleman, or become a crook. Maybe even a gentleman crook.
I told him that was an interesting analogy because James Cagney had told me something similar; he came from a deprived background from which you became a gangster, a priest or an actor. That almost made David laugh but because of the Motor Neurone Disease he stifled it and said, ‘Thank God I didn’t have to decide between those three options. I would never have cut the mustard as a priest. I mean, how do they get by without girls?’
By his own admission, in 1970, he was, as a young man, before, during and after Sandhurst, ‘a randy fellow with an unfortunate tendency to get an erection on all forms of transportation, and the best way to work it off was with the local prostitutes. There was little time to find girlfriends, although Nessie came down to Sandhurst for the Ball we had that summer of 1929. She made it very clear to me. “David, we’re only together for the larfs and the fuckin’, so don’t go gettin’ all serious on me.” I think by then I knew the score, and my crush on her had waned.’
By then he was seeing Ann Todd regularly. He had first seen her in a play in London and was so taken with her that he went to see her perform whenever he could.
She told me,
He would hang around the stage doors. He wanted to meet all the actors, or mostly the actresses. He seemed to have a liking for me especially. I was always bothered by what we called stage-door Johnnies.
I went on tour in a play by Ian Hay, and David started turning up to see this play in Portsmouth – every night – and he drew love hearts against my name in the programme and sent them to my dressing room. That got very irritating because it was so childish and I didn’t believe he was really in love with me. We hadn’t even met. I was desperate that he shouldn’t come near me and on the last night I was waiting for Ian Hay to come and see me and I was going to tell him to make sure that a chap called David Niven didn’t come to my dressing room, and as soon as Ian walked in he said, ‘I’d like you to meet David Niven. I knew his father.’ And there he was, right behind Ian Hay, smiling and full of charm and very handsome. But I was still annoyed. I got to realise that David directly or indirectly knew everybody.
He was so charming and funny that it was impossible not to accept his invitation to dinner one night. So when the tour was over, I met him for dinner. He wasn’t earning much but he insisted that he pay for everything. He was very old fashioned about that sort of thing. He must have borrowed the money to pay for the meal. He was always very keen to impress me, probably because I was an actress and he was very keen on the theatre. I don’t think he was thinking too much about becoming an actor at first.
I went to see some of the Army concerts he was in, and he was very funny. David was funny all the time. If he wasn’t on stage being funny he was telling stories that were funny.
One evening when we were out to dinner, I said, ‘David, don’t you take anything seriously?’
He said, ‘I take you very seriously.’
I thought, Uh-oh, here it comes, the declaration of love. And then he said, ‘Have you got a shilling? I don’t think I have enough to leave a tip.’
I was relieved and annoyed. I had feelings for him but I didn’t want to be tied down to a soldier who could end up anywhere in the world. So I wanted to hear him say something sweet but also I didn’t want to hear it.
One day I couldn’t bear it any longer and I said, very earnestly, ‘David, where are we going?’
He said, ‘To a party, darling.’ He knew what I meant but he dodged the question.
He continued to spend his summer holidays at Bembridge with his mother who was suffering considerable pain from a mysterious illness. David spent his hours sailing and working off his frustrations on the local girls. He would later regret not spending more time with his mother.
He returned to Sandhurst in September 1929 for his final term and was promoted to junior under-officer. In October he performed in another variety show and later played the juvenile lead in The Speckled Band, a Sherlock Holmes mystery. He continued to excel in rugby, but he did poorly in his final exams.
He had long wanted to get into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and had even learned to play the bagpipes in readiness. He got his chance formally to request his admission into the regiment of his choice when he filled in a War Office form. He had to list three regiments in order of preference. His first was the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. His second choice was the Black Watch. For his third choice he wrote, ‘Anything but the Highland Light Infantry.’ He thought that a funny joke. Somebody didn’t laugh at his joke and that’s possibly why he was sent to the Highland Light Infantry.
He left Sandhurst a few days before Christmas, 1929, depressed about his fortunes, and at the end of February joined the Highland Light Infantry. He spent nine months learning how to command a platoon and, at the beginning of October 1930, was posted to Malta where he was put in charge of No. 3 platoon which was made up of around 30 tough Glaswegians.
Ann Todd was the girl he left behind. She told me, ‘I knew the Army would send him away. I didn’t want to fall madly in love with him because it would hurt. But it hurt all the same when he went to Malta.’ She recalled,
We had a quiet dinner on our last night together. He said, ‘Darling, will you wait for me?’ I would have laughed if I hadn’t felt like crying.
I said, ‘And while I’m waiting for you, will you be confining yourself to barracks?’
‘What do you mean?’
I said, ‘I’m sure there are plenty of pretty girls on Malta.’
He said, ‘I’ll be far too busy for that sort of thing. I doubt I’ll have a minute to myself.’ He looked sincere but it was almost melodramatic. Over the top. Like in a silent movie.
When we were saying goodbye, he kissed me and said ‘You do know that I love you,’ and he said it very lightly but that meant he really meant it.
Leaving Ann and just about everything else he loved in life behind, he was shipped off to Malta.
CHAPTER 5
—
Malta
‘I hated Malta from the moment I arrived,’ David told me in 1970.
I was still a young man, only 21, but my fellow officers were almost all middle aged and they didn’t want anything to do with me. Even my commanding officer wouldn’t talk to me. The first thing he ever said to me, at a regimental dinner, was, ‘I have fucked women of every nationality and most animals, but the one thing I cannot abide is a girl with a Glaswegian accent. Pass the port.’ He never spoke to me again.
I had hoped to join the 2nd Battalion in India which would have been far more exciting than policing a huge rock in the Mediterranean. The only excitement we had was when stones were thrown at a Custom
s shed in the harbour one night during an anti-demonstration. It was terribly depressing.
The only good thing was that I met a big fellow, standing six feet and six inches [1.98m] with a bushy handlebar moustache and the most wonderful and often bizarre taste in humour, and that was Michael Trubshawe.
I interviewed Michael Trubshawe in 1984 and he was more than happy to talk about his friendship with David as long as I also asked him plenty of questions about his career because he became an actor and appeared in small roles in many films, mainly World War II pictures.
Trubshawe, a big bear of a man with a bushy moustache he’d sported since his Army days, told me, ‘We were almost made for each other on Malta. He was a second lieutenant and I was another second lieutenant, and we both loved sex and alcohol, and a combination of those two things meant trouble. We loved trouble too.
‘The men I commanded in B Company seemed to like my peculiar ways but my fellow officers thought I was pretty disgraceful. Nivvy wasn’t much liked by his fellow officers either, but he and I took to each other straight away. We met at a cricket match. Our battalion versus the Royal Artillery.’
Trubshawe had strode over to David, shook him by the hand and offered him a generous helping of whiskey and soda. Said Trubshawe,
Niv was an immediately likeable person. He was very outgoing with his friends but could be quite anxious when surrounded by people he didn’t like or with whom he had nothing in common.
I saw him one night at a regimental dinner stuck between two officers, one of whom was his commanding officer. Niv had put back several glasses of wine and from the look on his face I figured that his bladder was close to bursting. But he couldn’t leave his seat because no one was allowed to leave the table until a toast to the king had been made at the end of the meal. So he put away his soup and three courses, and I thought that I could help the poor chap out. So I got our mess steward to push an empty magnum under the table where he sat and let Niv know that it was with my compliments. So Niv relieved himself into the magnum, and the look on his face as he emptied his bladder over the next several minutes was priceless.
He helped me out one time the way only a good friend like that can. We were at an Army function and one of my superior officers asked me to dance with his wife. That wouldn’t normally be a problem but this woman always stank of something I can only describe as lavatory cleaner which is why none of the other men would dance with her. I think her husband must have suffered – or been blessed – with absolutely no sense of smell. Suddenly the fire alarm was sounded and the whole place was quickly evacuated. But no one could find a fire. I said to David, ‘Damn funny that fire alarm and no fire,’ and he said, ‘That was me, old boy. I saw you dancing with that dreadful woman and could see you were holding your breath and thought if I didn’t do something soon you would probably pass out or die, so the only thing I could think of was to sound the alarm.’
Trubshawe said that David would have been a ‘really good soldier because he took the whole thing very seriously. I didn’t.’ He continued, The Army wrecked any chance of him becoming a good soldier by sending him to Malta where we were just a Home Service station on domestic duties. That depressed him.
He knew how to be a good soldier, and he knew how to gain the respect of the men. He commanded their respect. He was just like a regular soldier when he was on parade or in the mess. But something was missing. He didn’t have the fire for it. By day he was a soldier, but late at night if you went into his room you’d find him leafing through theatre programmes or reading the society pages of the Tatler.
I said to him, ‘What are you reading those things for?’ and he said, ‘Because right now I’d rather be an actor than a soldier, and I’d rather be at a dinner party among high society than stuck here on this bloody rock.’ He was so bored and frustrated that he started getting into trouble.
David always tried to fit in, wherever he was. But when he found himself a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, he rebelled. When he met me he was delighted because I rebelled too. I’d been thrown out of Cambridge because I spent all my time on the hunting field instead of at lectures. So we were like two peas in a pod.
At first we were unable to get out of the barracks often because the second-in-command, who had no friends and hated seeing all the young officers going off to cocktail parties, decided we all had to do fencing every evening at six o’clock. The young men, who hadn’t learned to fence, were being cut to ribbons. So finally, after a week of this, David said to me, ‘I think something needs to be done about this waste of good drinking time,’ and without giving me a clue what he was up to, he started fencing with the fencing tutor. My God, he looked as good as Douglas Fairbanks in one of his swashbuckling pictures. He made the fencing tutor look like a beginner.
Afterwards David said, ‘No, I’m not really that good, but I was taught by a staff sergeant at Sandhurst how to fence dirty.’ He’d used all the dirty tricks he knew with a sword, and after that demonstration of his skills fencing was no longer compulsory and we used our drinking time wisely.
I was two years older than David and I had a private income whereas he was struggling to manage on the nine shillings a day the Army paid him. So I took care of all bills – drink, food and girls, that sort of thing.
I knew the best whores on the island. David was bursting for some hanky panky and said he hadn’t had any since he left England. So I took him to a very good brothel called Auntie’s.
I also knew a very nice Maltese girl who was not a regular prostitute but would often give me a good time for payment. I asked her if she had a friend for David, and she did, but the friend wanted paying also. So I arranged for us to meet them in a little hotel, and he took a liking to my usual girl, and I said, ‘Sorry, old boy, but that one’s for me.’
He said, ‘That’s utter rubbish and you know it. No one has exclusive rights when you pay for it.’
I said, ‘Well I do when I’m paying,’ and he said, ‘Oh, right, yes, of course. Yes, the other girl is most pretty.’
So the next time I said to him, ‘Right old man, you can have my girl,’ and he said, ‘Thanks all the same but I like the one I’ve got.’
So I said, ‘But you said you fancied mine,’ and he said, ‘I know, but my girl knows some really good tricks.’
I said, ‘Are you paying for her?’
He said, ‘Ah…no!’
‘Very well,’ I said, ‘then yours is mine and mine is yours, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’
Afterwards, I said to him, ‘How was it?’
He said, ‘Oh marvellous. Your girl was very good. Funny thing, though. She said it made a nice change not to have a rash all over her face and tits.’
I said, ‘What is she talking about?’
‘That moustache of yours, old boy,’ he said. ‘Gives her a terrible rash.’
‘Why didn’t she mention it before?’ I said, and Niv replied, ‘Because you’re the one who pays.’
After that I thought we should try the non-professional girls of which there were many on the island. They were daughters of officers, even wives of officers, and the lonely wives of sailors who were always off to sea, leaving their poor wives behind with no one to take care of their needs. So David and I volunteered. Often.
There was never any shortage of women. I said to him that we should try the older women – the officers’ wives. He said, ‘I’m not into old ladies.’ But then he realised that a lot of the wives were only in their early 30s and still very nice looking, so he said, ‘I always fancied trying an older woman,’ and he got very involved with a captain’s wife.
The captain found out and called Niv into his office and said, ‘Look here, Niven, are you very much in love with my wife?’
Niv said, ‘No, sir. Not at all, sir.’
So the captain said, ‘Then will you please stop telling her you are. It upsets her.’
So Niv found he had the captain’s blessing. That put him off. ‘What�
�s the fun in poking a man’s wife if he knows it and doesn’t care?’ he asked. So he moved on to somebody else’s wife.
Apart from keeping other men’s wives happy, David’s other great talent was telling anecdotes that captured the interest of everyone around him. Trubshawe said, ‘He told the best stories, or rather he was the best at telling stories. I remember him at a dinner party given by the Commander-in-Chief on board ship where there were two dozen guests, and Niv was able to manipulate the conversation until he was the centre of attention, telling stories that had them all in hysterics. He had a single pip on his shoulder yet even the most senior officers were his captive audience. It was just astonishing the way he could tell an anecdote. He was a raconteur even at that young age.’
In the summer of 1931 David returned to England for two months’ leave and was shocked by two discoveries. The first was that Nessie had gone. The second was that his mother, holidaying at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, had cancer of the colon. But she didn’t complain. She was just happy to be surrounded by her family because Max was briefly home from the South Pacific where he managed a banana plantation, and Grizel was home too, having just given up on an acting career. She had studied at RADA but decided she would do better to study sculpting at the Chelsea Polytechnic. She had also discovered that she was a lesbian, and David lovingly referred to her as ‘my sister the dyke’.
Max needed money so Henrietta loaned him £3,000, a huge amount in 1931, and told him he needn’t repay the loan until after her death. The seriousness of her illness still didn’t dawn on David, and he concentrated his energies that summer on his favourite subjects – boats, booze and girls.
When he returned to Malta, he and Trubshawe continued their antics ‘because it was so bloody boring there,’ said Trubshawe.
We got drunk quite a lot, and when we did, we got up to all sorts of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. One night we decided it would be a bit of a wheeze to dress as women, and the Madame at Auntie’s allowed us to mingle with her girls who all helped to dress us and put make-up on us. Of course, I had this moustache! When I asked Niv how I looked, he said, ‘Nobody will want to poke you. You’ve got a hairy face.’