David Niven

by Michael Munn

  There were cheers and cat-calls and the music started playing again and people were dancing. Nobody was fooled any longer by the phoney war. Then I was suddenly struck by the sight of a beautiful WAAF but she didn’t seem to notice me, so I was about to remedy that and go over to speak to her when someone said to me, ‘Excuse me but my name is Jimmy Bosville.’ There was this young man in uniform, and he said, ‘I recognised you.’

  I said, feeling rather depressed, ‘Oh, please don’t ask for an autograph or expect me to talk about my pictures.’

  He said, ‘Oh, no, you see, I was with an air commodore this morning who was talking about a visit you paid to his office. I wish I’d been there.’ So I told him to sit down, and he said ‘Look, old man, why don’t you come to the Rifle Brigade?’

  I told him, ‘You couldn’t get me into a ladies’ lavatory at Leicester Square.’

  It turned out he was in the Rifle Brigade and in command of the 2nd Battalion. The Rifle Brigade was arguably the most famous of all the elite light infantry regiments, and three weeks later, with Bosville’s help, I was training at Tidworth as a second lieutenant.

  I was an ex-regular and found not too much had changed over the years and I quickly caught up with the much younger men.

  Later, I learned that I’d been earmarked for the 1st Battalion which was on the Belgian border. But at that time my job was to train conscripts.

  David underwent three months’ training towards the end of February 1940, and was then posted to Tidworth on Salisbury Plain to train the conscripts, most of them from the East End of London. He recalled, ‘They whined and whinged a lot, complaining that I was merely a movie star telling them what to do and about what they had left behind, so finally I told them, “Right, you lot, now listen to me. You have only left your factories and butchers’ shops. I could be with Ginger Rogers.” And that shut them up and they were very good chaps after that.’

  While at Tidworth, Niven took advantage of his film star status to get girls. ‘I could have had a different girl every night,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t mind that they only wanted to go to bed with me because I was in pictures. It was a perk. And I needed something to keep my mind off my life back in Hollywood. I actually resented having to leave it behind, you know. Yes, I volunteered, but I resented the war for messing up my film career, and I didn’t have much respect for the politicians who had caused the whole bloody mess in the first place. I hated every minute of [the war], and I am only happy that I managed to get through the whole thing without behaving badly. I always did my best, but it was never better than what I was told to do.’

  One politician he did have respect for was Winston Churchill whom he met during the time he was still training. He recalled,

  I had a few days’ leave [in February 1940] and went to Ditchley for the weekend where Nancy and Ronnie Tree lived. Nancy was a cousin of Nora Flynn, one of Errol’s ex-wives. Ronnie Tree was an MP who had voted with Winston Churchill against Chamberlain over Munich. [Tree was also the First Lord of the Admiralty and a personal friend of Churchill’s.]

  Churchill and his wife were among the guests, as well as Brendan Bracken and Anthony Eden, and when Churchill saw me sitting at the other end of the table, he got up and strode over and shook my hand.

  He said, ‘Young man, you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country.’

  I said, ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Then he growled, ‘Mind you, had you not done so, it would have been despicable.’

  The next day – it was a Sunday – Churchill asked me to stroll in the garden with him, and he talked about the joys of gardening, and then got on to the subject of food rationing. He asked me about the problems a young officer in the Army faced, and he was always most attentive to what I had to say. Ah! To have the ears of the mighty!

  Ronnie Tree asked me to arrange for a special screening of a Deanna Durbin film for Churchill so I hired a private cinema in Soho and invited the Edens and the Trees, but Churchill was late. When he eventually arrived, he lit a cigar, drank a brandy and sat down to enjoy the film. Halfway through he got up to leave. I saw him to the door and he thanked me but said that something important had come up and he had to return to the Admiralty.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that Churchill’s business for that evening was ordering HMS Cossack to chase the German supply ship Altmark into the Jossing Fjord in Norway, board her and free 299 British merchant seamen whose ships were sunk by the Graf Spee. The mission was one of Britain’s early successes.

  The date was 15 February 1940. The ‘phoney war’ was over and the real war had begun.

  In April David was promoted to lieutenant. He was also best man at his brother Max’s wedding. Meanwhile, he waited impatiently to be posted to the 1st Battalion in France. ‘I wasn’t impatient because I wanted to do anything clever or heroic,’ he said. ‘I just got so bored which happens to soldiers who know they will go into action eventually. You only want to go because you want to get it over and done with.’

  Then came the evacuation from Dunkirk in the last days of May and the first few days of June. The 1st Battalion was fighting in Calais with its back to the Channel, protecting the evacuation of the troops from Dunkirk. Eventually Niven received his orders to stand by along with 200 replacements to head for Dunkirk. But by 4 June it was all over and the entire 1st Battalion had either been killed or taken prisoner.

  ‘It could have all ended for me right there, at Dunkirk,’ he said, ‘but providence kept me out of the thick of it, and then it was all over. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t relieved. On the other hand, there is a sense of guilt one has about not being there. Hundreds lost their lives on the beaches at Dunkirk.’

  I have read some accounts which placed Niven at Dunkirk, but he never reached there; those accounts were probably invented by fan magazines and studio publicity. ‘I may have enlarged on various aspects of my life,’ he told me, ‘but not about the war. That was too serious. Too bleak. Too overwhelming in regards to the consequences to humanity to make up stories about false heroics.’

  Secret military organisations were being set up all over Britain, and a call went out for volunteers for a new commando unit under Colonel Dudley Clarke whose primary purpose was to make ‘cut and thrust’ raids on the enemy coastline. Niven put his name forward and went before Colonel Clarke who revealed little about the unit except that he had some special ideas which he would disclose at a later date. Meanwhile, David was ordered to report to Lochailort Castle in the Western Highlands of Scotland for training.

  David never boasted of any great aspirations to perform any acts of courage and derring-do. ‘Most of the volunteers were made of much sterner stuff than I,’ he said. ‘I was there out of boredom. I never was a hero.’

  Among his instructors were Lord Lovat, demolition expert ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, and numerous other highly decorated and important commando leaders. ‘They taught us a variety of methods of silently killing,’ he recalled.

  In July 1940, Niven and his fellow commandos were put to the test. Germany had bombed the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey on 28 June 1940, and by 30 June Guernsey was under German occupation. It was decided that the commandos would execute a raid on Guernsey, and in preparation they trained on the Isle of Wight.

  The raid took place on 15 July. David wrote in The Moon’s a Balloon that the operation was a success, but in 1978 he said, ‘The truth was, it was generally considered a farce. The commanding officer slipped and accidentally fired his revolver, thus alerting the enemy. Three men said they couldn’t swim to the pick-up boat and so they were left behind. One team ended up on Sark due to compass failure, while another team landed on undefended points of the island to no purpose. We did manage to take a few bemused prisoners from their beds. But, really, we were undertrained.’

  In 1982 he made one change to his account at Sark; ‘The truth about the war had to be bent for the sake of morale. When we landed on Sark, we di
dn’t even manage to take any prisoners, but the public were told we had. It’s sometimes important to bend the truth when you want to boost morale.’

  In September 1940, Niven was promoted. ‘I became a captain, and made liaison officer for MO9 which was the War Department responsible for commando operations,’ he explained. ‘I was installed at the War Office where I shared a desk with Captain Quentin Hogg. But most of the time I was travelling around contacting the various commando units. Because of the very real and imminent threat of invasion, the commandos were switched from being offensive to defensive, and plans were drawn up for us to transform ourselves into an underground movement.’

  He again met Churchill at Ditchley.

  ‘He asked me what I was doing at the moment, so I told him about my part in commando operations. “You shouldn’t be telling me this,” he said. “Your security is very lax.” I never knew for sure if he was genuinely angry, but he was probably right.’

  There was one particular wartime story that David embellished, but not for the sake of boosting morale. On the night he met Jimmy Bosville at the Café de Paris in London, before he had been sidetracked by Bosville’s suggestion he join the Rifle Brigade, he had set eyes upon a beautiful WAAF. David went on to tell me, that by lucky coincidence he spotted the beautiful WAAF one day at the National Gallery in London and introduced himself to her. She was Primula Rollo, a cipher clerk at the RAF Reconnaissance Squadron at Heston. He said it was love at first sight. They became engaged and were married at the parish church of Huish on the Wiltshire Downs on 21 September. Michael Trubshawe was the best man. Throughout the ceremony, the Battle of Britain raged above in a cloudless sky.

  In 1978 Niven told me a different account of how he met Primmie, as he called her. ‘I went to the RAF station at Biggin Hill [south of London] and there was an air raid. I jumped into a slit trench and found I was sharing it with Primmie who was a cipher officer. She gave me a telling off for almost crushing her as I jumped in, and I told her I was dreadfully sorry but wasn’t making too much of an effort to see what I was landing on and that I just didn’t want to get blown up by a German bomb. We started to argue, and she said she outranked me, and I said I outranked her, and then we saw how silly the situation was as bombs went off all over the airfield and we were more concerned about who outranked who. We began laughing, and I honestly think I loved her from that moment.’

  Everyone I ever talked to who knew Primmie adored her. Michael Trubshawe said,

  David had told me that he had met the most wonderful girl in the world and that he was going to marry her and was the luckiest man alive. I thought, Oh, here he goes, falling in love again, but when I met her I could see that she was finally the perfect girl for him. She was an absolute darling, very radiant. She was what you think an English girl of the 1930s and 40s should have been. She was it. That world of rose cottages in the country, well behaved children, the upper class lady, like Mrs Miniver.

  I think that she immediately gave David something he needed badly in his life, especially when the war came along – a sense of continuity. A purpose. A reason to come home. The war seemed to make more sense to him when he married Primmie. His life made sense. She was his life.

  Peter Ustinov said in an interview I did with him in 1984, ‘She was perfect for David. She had no ambition to be anything other than Mrs David Niven, which is what he wanted. But she managed to stand out and, in fact, you always felt she was a Very Important Person but without being condescending – a bit like a member of the royal family who smiled a good deal and talked in that very fine almost mincing voice the Queen has – “My husband and I…” She always seemed interested in you. She looked interested, and that expression was always there when you met. I think she would have done very well if she had been sent to visit factories during the war because she would have at least looked very interested in what everyone was doing.’

  Mr and Mrs David Niven bought a cottage near Slough. Primmie left the RAF and, determined to contribute to the war effort, cycled each morning to Slough to help build Hurricanes at Hawker’s factory while David volunteered for a highly secretive unit called ‘Phantom’. He explained,

  It was one of the least known of the wartime special regiments invented by Colonel Hopkinson who had realised during the retreat from Dunkirk that there was a dire need for reliable communication from the front line.

  He came up with the simple idea of deploying highly mobile squadrons equipped with radios and dispatch riders among forward units. We even used carrier pigeons. Phantom’s commanding officer would remain with the Army Commander, and when situations needed clarifying, the Squadron Commander checked his map to find the Phantom unit in the problem vicinity and then sent a message directly to it.

  I was made a major and took over ‘A’ Squadron. We became involved in the preparations to form underground movements in the event of invasion. My own special disguise was that of a parson.

  Actually, I was convinced that Hitler was about to invade us, and I felt that would be the end of everything. I saw it as the end of the world, and I can’t deny I was actually quite terrified. I would wake up at night sometimes, having dreamed the Germans had landed, dreaming that I was waking up to find myself staring up at jack booted Nazis with guns. If I was with Primmie, I would look at her, still asleep, and cry because I was so afraid I would lose her. I couldn’t bear that thought.

  If I awoke in barracks, without Primmie there, I would have this feeling that I would never see her again, and that would also make me cry. So when we were together, I enjoyed every minute, every second. I was never happier in my life than when I was with her. Never.

  Despite his incredible happiness, he was unable to stay faithful to her. Laurence Olivier was quite critical of Niven on that score. ‘Even when Vivien was at her worst [with mental illness], I never was unfaithful to her though she was to me, but David had the most perfect wife in the world and he could not stay faithful to her. I became a philanderer through necessity. David was born a philanderer.’

  If that seems harsh, then here’s what John Mills had to say to me in 1985. ‘Niv loved Primmie to death, but he loved all women, though not in the way he loved Primmie. So he loved as many women as he could – even when he was married to Primmie. I didn’t approve, but it’s not my place to judge.’

  In 1982, David confessed to me that he had been unfaithful to Primmie. ‘I was a fool. When we were apart during the war, it was all too easy to have sex with other women who wanted to go to bed with a Hollywood movie star. Some of them no more than 16, but I was insatiable, you see – always have been. It’s a terrible flaw in me. I can forgive myself by and large, but to be unfaithful to the best wife a man ever had was unpardonable. I knew it at the time, but my erection was stronger than my spirit, if you’ll pardon the vernacular.’

  In the late summer of 1941, Niven made a film for the British Government, The First of the Few. ‘We weren’t doing well in the war and the government needed something to inspire the nation during a time of crisis and films were an ideal way to do that, so they persuaded Sam Goldwyn to let me do The First of the Few. I was still under contract to Goldwyn and even the British Government had to borrow me from Goldwyn for a suitable sum of money.’

  David was released temporarily to civil employment so he could make the film which was backed by the RAF. It was the story of R.J. Mitchell, the aircraft designer who invented the Spitfire. Niven played the fictional role of an ex RAF officer who joins Mitchell as a test pilot. Leslie Howard produced and directed the film, and he and Niven became firm friends. Released in 1942 in Britain, the film found favour with British critics and audiences. ‘The film is full of action…and flashes from the Battle of Britain with which, pointing its moral, it begins and ends,’ wrote the Sunday Times. ‘It has moments of pathos and many scenes of agreeable, flippant comedy, contributed for the most part by David Niven who gives one of his best performances.’

  The Observer noted, ‘David Niven’s flippant
assurance is just right here. The real-life story is the more real for his imagined presence; he gives the rather abstracted film a body.’

  The Scotsman, said, ‘David Niven’s performance as the test pilot is one of the best he has ever done.’

  Niven told me, ‘It wasn’t a difficult role for me to play. Like the character from Dawn Patrol, I knew men like him. Things hadn’t changed in the military since my days at Sandhurst. I could play an officer. I played many officers. I suppose it took another world war for me to find my niche in pictures. I probably played more military officers than anybody else. It took just four weeks to film. Leslie Howard did a wonderful job of both directing and acting in it, and we became very good friends.

  ‘It didn’t do well in America where it was released through Sam Goldwyn who hated the film. He renamed it Spitfire which didn’t mean much to the Americans, and he cut the film and ruined it.’

  During this break from active service, David met with Churchill for another garden stroll, and the Prime Minister confided his fears of an invasion of Britain to Niven who asked Churchill if he thought the Americans would ever enter the war. ‘Mark my words,’ Churchill told him, ‘something cataclysmic will occur.’

  It did, on 7 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and effectively brought the United States into the war. Some months later, Niven reminded Churchill of his prediction about America and asked him what made him say it. Churchill replied, ‘Because, young man, I study history.’

  Pearl Harbor had a positive effect upon David. ‘I stopped having nightmares about Britain being invaded. I knew then we could beat the Germans, and I thought that if I could just manage not to get myself killed then when the war was over I’d be completely happy with Primmie for the rest of our lives.’

  Although The First of the Few was filmed quickly, Niven was given extended leave over the Christmas period and returned to service in Phantom in late January 1942. It proved to be a particularly harsh winter, and in freezing and icy conditions Niven led his men to Wales for a two-month reconnaissance along the coast to plan for a potential German invasion from Ireland.