by Michael Munn
I said, ‘I don’t want anyone to poke me.’
He said, ‘But you want them to think they are going to poke you. That moustache will have to go.’
I said, ‘Come one step nearer and I’ll drop you where you stand.’ Then David had an idea. He got a veil and put it over my face but the moustache is so big that the veil had to be huge and it covered almost all my face. He said, ‘We’ll say you’re an exotic Turkish whore.’
I said, ‘Nobody will believe that,’ but Niv said, ‘Want to bet?’
So we joined the girls and waited for some customers. Niv looked like Clara Bow with little cupid lips. We were the ugliest whores in the brothel. But a couple of Naval officers took a shine to us. ‘Here we go,’ he said when he spotted these two officers giving us the eye. I thought they would spot us as fakes in a minute and give us hell. But they were really interested. They knew we were men – that was obvious. We didn’t fool them for a minute, which was what the joke was supposed to be. They were willing to pay top price for us. The Madame was haggling. David whispered to me, ‘Get rid of the veil. That’ll make them change their minds.’
So I whipped off the veil and one of the officers said, ‘Christ, even better!’
Then Niv said, ‘Discretion, old man – better part of valour and all that,’ and we shot out of there, still in our frocks, and arrived back at barracks like that. We just marched past the guard and saluted, and he stood there with his mouth gaping open as we strode by in our frocks.
Despite these escapades, David was restless in Malta and asked to be transferred to the West Africa Frontier Force, but his request was denied.
‘If it wasn’t for Trubshawe,’ David said, ‘I would have gone insane. We started running out of ideas how to keep ourselves entertained. We tried joining the Malta Amateur Drama Society but were rejected, so we decided to put on our own show in a canteen at the docks. Not the most glamorous of venues, but we ran for three nights. Our show consisted of funny sketches and highland dancing. We were surprisingly successful and it reminded me how much I enjoyed performing.’
Niven and Trubshawe were relieved to be returned to England in December 1931 and stationed at the Citadel barracks above the town of Dover overlooking the English Channel. Trubshawe bought a car so they could occasionally race off to London, more than 70 miles (112 km) away, to meet girls.
David finally bought his own car, purchased with a small inheritance of £200 left to him by his grandmother who died that spring. In his Morris Cowley he was able to run around, finding girls here and there, while Trubshawe made plans to settle down, having got engaged to a girl, Margie Macdougall, he had met in Malta.
That pretty much brought an end to the Niven-Trubshawe era of schoolboy escapades, and their friendship would never be the same again.
CHAPTER 6
—
America
Now that Trubshawe was no longer single and fancy free, David went to parties on his own, and at several very fashionable social events in London that summer he kept meeting Barbara Hutton, the beautiful 19-year-old American Woolworths heiress. She was engaged to a Georgian prince, Alex Mdivani, but she liked David so much that they became firm friends and when the time came for her to return to the United States she invited him to join her for Christmas in New York.
Around that time he was seeing a beautiful hostess at the Café de Paris called Merle Oberon who was trying to become an actress and had appeared fleetingly and uncredited in a number of British movies. She was half-Indian, half-British – her ethnicity was kept a secret for many years – and possessed stunning exotic looks which captivated David.
That November, in 1932, David received word from Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt that Henrietta was dying in a nursing home in South Kensington in London. He rushed from Aldershot, where he was on a training course, to be with her. She had undergone an operation but peritonitis had set in and she was unconscious.
In 1982 David said to me, ‘I was too selfish at such a young age when we holidayed at Bembridge to realise I should have spent more time with my mother. It was only in those last years that I really came to understand that she had loved me very much. I had grown up thinking I was unwanted and unloved. I suppose that was my naturally selfish attitude. But by the time she died it was too late.
‘I saw her before she passed away but she couldn’t recognise me. I felt crushed and ashamed, and I didn’t want to lose my mother now that I had realised what a wonderful mother she was. I took her for granted and didn’t make the effort to make her more happy. I didn’t spend enough time with her.’
David had also been seeing Ann Todd regularly; she had become a rising star having made five films in two years. She told me, ‘His mother hoped that I’d marry him. She told me that if I ever had children I should not feel hurt if they spent their school holidays off with friends or going to parties instead of staying home. She never resented David enjoying his life while she was ill. I went with him to see her in hospital when she was dying. He suddenly seemed quite lost.’
It was a time when David was trying to come to terms with issues he had. He had neglected to realise how much his mother loved him, and he was also dealing with the truth about Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt being his father. ‘It took me a long time to realise that the man who was my real father had made her happy,’ he said in 1982. ‘I think I always resented that he seemed to have her more than I did, and I never wanted to acknowledge that he was my father, and it rankled that he never publicly acknowledged that I was his son.
‘One day when we were on holiday at Bembridge, she said to me, “David, please try and understand the position he is in. He’s an important public figure and it would cause a scandal if it were known that he had illegitimate children.” I took that to mean that neither of them cared for me enough. I understand perfectly now.
‘I think I understood it when my mother was dying and I wanted her to know how happy I was to be her son. But it was too late. She never regained consciousness.’
Henrietta died at the age of 52 on 12 November with Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt at her side. She left an estate worth more than £14,000 which was a lot more than she had inherited from William Niven. It turned out she had left most of her money untouched all those years so it grew with interest while Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt paid for David’s and Grizel’s educations and all their living expenses.
Most of Henrietta’s estate was left in the care of trustees for use by Sir Thomas who would receive the entire income from the estate until he died, after which it would pass to her four children. David received half the family silver with the Niven crest and a grand butterfly brooch. Max received the other half of the silver along with some jewellery, and to Grizel and Joyce went diamonds, sapphires, brooches, earrings and pearl and platinum rings.
As well as intense grief, David also suffered from confusion and uncertainty. He knew he had made a grave error in choosing the Army over the Navy, and he began to wonder what he would do with the rest of his life. He certainly didn’t foresee a future as a solider. One day, Ann Todd introduced him to Laurence Olivier, another rising star of the theatre, and David thinks that was the moment he began to wonder if he could make a career for himself as an actor.
Olivier told me that initially he saw no potential in David as an actor. ‘I thought he was really rather silly when I first saw him. He obviously loved mixing with actors and seemed to want to impress them all, so he would put on very silly voices and make funny faces, and Merle clearly thought a lot of him and she was very sweet to him. He was seeing both Merle and Ann, you know, and hoped they could help him. I think he was trying hard to be an actor, but he really was just someone who created funny characters.’
Ann Todd wasn’t convinced that David could ever be an actor. She said, ‘Around the time his mother died he told me he was thinking of becoming an actor. He wanted to know what I thought about him leaving the Army and going into the Theatre. He always enjoyed seeing plays and I knew he enjoyed performing. I’d
seen some of his sketches he did at Army concerts and he was very funny, but it was always him impersonating somebody or pretending to skate without any ice; that kind of thing. It wasn’t acting. So I said to him, “David, you are not an actor. If you said ‘I love you,’ nobody would believe you.” I’m afraid that rather crushed him.’
The death of Henrietta was a crossroads in David’s life. He felt extreme guilt and grief, and now he was uncertain about his future. What he was sure about was that the Army wasn’t a part of it.
David’s commanding officer at Aldershot gave him a month’s leave, so David cabled Barbara Hutton in New York to ask if he could visit. She cabled him to come immediately, so he sold his car, borrowed money from the bank and from Grizel, and bought the cheapest ticket to sail to New York, arriving on Christmas Eve.
‘I’d not experienced American hospitality before,’ David said, ‘but I stepped ashore and was immediately met by Barbara and some of her friends and was made to feel unbelievably welcome. I was whisked off to the Pierre Hotel, a very elegant and exclusive place where Barbara’s family lived in several swish suites. I wasn’t allowed to pay for a single thing and I lived like a millionaire for a week. I was really overwhelmed by their warmth and generosity. I simply wasn’t allowed to pay for anything – not that I could have afforded to.’
He was treated to a night at the Central Park Casino where bootleg liquor was flowing despite Prohibition, and he spent Christmas Day with Barbara’s family and was showered with presents. He was introduced to American football and an assortment of nightclubs. He also had a girlfriend which I only heard about in 1980 when I had lunch with him and Lynne Frederick. He said, ‘I met a very nice girl in New York on my first trip there, called Maureen Brennan, a fitness therapist with a very nice line in acrobatic sex. I was fit but not that fit, and I hurt my back rather badly. From time to time my bad back has returned but I’ve always told people I damaged it during the war. I was too embarrassed to say I hurt it having intercourse. Not that I was embarrassed to have intercourse. Everybody does. I was embarrassed to say I got damaged having intercourse.’
He had, of course, experienced high society life, something reserved for the lucky few. It was only a fantasy that many European immigrants to America dreamed about, thinking the streets were paved with gold. David would become one of the lucky ones because most immigrants wound up living in poverty. David wound up living in Hollywood. But Hollywood was still a long way from Aldershot.
‘I’d realised that there was a way of life in America that was like a dream,’ he told me. ‘I couldn’t wait to go back and I knew that when I did it would be for good – or at least, for a very long time. Even on the voyage home I benefited from the generosity of an American who was a passenger and who shared with me his daily sweepstake ticket, and I won £160.’
In late February 1933 he sailed back to England, vowing to return to America at the earliest opportunity. Trubshawe had left the regiment to marry Margie Macdougall, and Army life became ever more dull.
Niven was promoted to full lieutenant and bought a sports Bentley with his sweepstake winnings and drove to London whenever he could to be with Ann Todd and Merle Oberon. Ann seemed not to know about Merle, and told me, ‘David was getting very serious about me and I think we might have got married, perhaps. But we were just never alone. He liked to be in a crowd, always wanting to be at the centre of it all. I didn’t like crowds. We just weren’t suited.’
David didn’t let the grass grow under his feet. He had yet another girlfriend, Priscilla Weigall, voted Deb of the Year. She had friends in high society, among them Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling actor from the days of silent movies who was now living in Hertfordshire. Knowing that David wanted to be an actor, Priscilla introduced him to Fairbanks and the two hit it off immediately, but David couldn’t find the nerve to ask Fairbanks outright for help in becoming an actor.
Priscilla then introduced him to film producer Bunty Watts who gave him a job as an extra in a film she was making, All the Winners. David appeared briefly as one of a crowd at the races, but it wasn’t enough to get him noticed so he went back to soldiering.
Things suddenly improved for him when a new commanding officer was appointed in the spring, Colonel Alec Telfer-Smollett. The regiment was revitalised under his command and David found him very approachable. Before long the colonel was inviting him to dine and play golf.
‘He was someone who believed in the ancient concept of a regiment. That it should be a family,’ he told me in 1970.
I said to him, ‘You seem to have taken to men in authority who treated the people around them almost like family.’
‘Yes, I suppose I have. I suppose I never really felt I had enjoyed a family life so I took what substitutes came along.’
‘Were these men father figures to you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, they were, because I lost my father when I was five.’ This, of course, was what David said in 1970 when he was still referring to Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt as ‘Uncle Tommy’. He said that in the spring of 1933, he was invited to lunch by Uncle Tommy at the Carlton Club. ‘Apart from seeing him at my mother’s funeral, I hadn’t seen him for many years. As I approached him at his table, he rose from his chair and I extended my hand to him, and he said, “The solicitors tell me that you’ve paid nothing towards the grave.” I felt that was unkind and I realised that I never wanted to see “dear old Uncle Tommy” ever again.’
That didn’t turn out to be the case. They would meet again, cordially, within weeks.
David’s spirits sunk when half his platoon went to India but he was among those sent to Salisbury Plain to learn all about machine-gunnery. He decided he’d finally had enough and resigned his commission so he could head for Canada to stay with an old friend and former soldier Victor Gordon-Lennox who had married a Canadian girl. Her family was in oil, but David’s intention was to head for Hollywood.
He said, ‘Sir Thomas was really rather kind to me after my mother died. He was upset that I’d neglected to contribute to the grave, that’s true. But he was not unkind, and when he heard I was intending to become an actor in Hollywood he was very worried that I might starve in the process of trying. So I told him I was going to work in the oil business, which I think impressed him. He understood I no longer wanted to remain in the Army and he gave me his blessing.
‘I only wish I had appreciated him more at the time. I think, you know, that it must have hurt him not to be able to acknowledge me or Grizel.’
Of his proposed trip, David said, ‘I really believed I could make it in America. When I said goodbye to the Army I wasn’t at all afraid. I suddenly felt like the world was finally my oyster. That’s the audacity of youth, and you have to take advantage of it before you grow out of it. The trouble was, I didn’t have enough money to get to Canada so I sold my body to science.’ It sounds like an extraordinary claim, which he made to me in 1970 and also in The Moon’s a Balloon, but he insisted he really had sold his body – or at least, the rights to use it after his death for medical research. ‘I got six pounds and ten shillings for it. And I had to sign a pledge that I would never smoke.’
He bought a return fare to Canada just in case things didn’t go well and sailed on 6 September 1933. He was 23 and had no real idea how he was going to achieve his dream of becoming a film star. ‘That’s the only way to do what you really want to do. You take a chance. The biggest chances can reap the biggest rewards. They can also bury you. I got lucky.’
He stayed with his former Army friend Victor Gordon-Lennox and his wife Diana whose parents were Admiral Charles and Lady Kingsmill. David stayed for a few weeks, fishing and exploring the countryside, and then headed for New York. He paid for his fair by cashing in his return ticket. He claimed that in Ottawa he came down with severe tonsillitis and had to have his tonsils removed. A few days later his throat bled so profusely that he had to be hospitalised again and given blood transfusions to save his life.
It was arou
nd the middle of October when he finally arrived by train in New York, virtually broke and barely able to afford to rent a small room in a cheap hotel. This was the era of the Great Depression and millions of Americans were unemployed but David landed a $40 a week job selling liquor for 21 Brands, a wholesale company that was part of the 21 Club where he had once been a regular guest with Barbara Hutton. It’s probable that she helped to land him the job, and his first sale was made to Barbara’s rich cousin, Woolworth Donahue.
‘I wasn’t a very good salesman,’ he said, ‘because I was always hanging around the 21 Club with Barbara and her many rich friends, and I just couldn’t bring myself to sell liquor to people who were buying me drinks and meals.’
He didn’t want his rich friends to know that he was staying in a cheap hotel so he told them he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria. Every morning he entered the hotel through the back door and left through the front, and each evening before returning to his cheap lodgings, he walked through the front doors of the Waldorf and left by the back. In the Waldorf lobby he bumped into Tommy Phipps, an old friend from England and the brother of actress Joyce Grenfell. Phipps introduced David to his father-in-law ‘Lefty’ Flynn who had once been an actor in Hollywood. Flynn in turn introduced David to Elsa Maxwell, a New York social fixer. She immediately took a liking to David and decided that he would do well in Hollywood because he spoke like Ronald Colman.
David had made no mention to any of his new friends that he wanted to be a Hollywood actor. ‘I thought that if I failed, I’d simply make a bloody fool of myself and look bloody ridiculous,’ he told me. ‘But I did get excited when Elsa invited me to a party that was in honour of Ernst Lubitsch [the film director]. Unfortunately, he ignored me.’