David Niven

by Michael Munn

  But before it was a hit, before the reviews glowed about Niven’s performance and before the Best Picture Oscar, David, upon finishing the film at the end of 1955, prepared for the next one he had agreed to do, The Silken Affair, another British production.

  Before he set off for England, Hjördis was hospitalised early in 1956. She had been pregnant, a secret she and David chose to keep because she had fallen pregnant before and each time had miscarried. It had happened again, only this time there were complications and she had to undergo a hysterectomy.

  Despite her failings as a stepmother, Hjördis had hoped to have children of her own, and as one pregnancy after another failed, the depression she was prone to became worse. I have read and heard that by this time she wasn’t allowing David to have intercourse with her, but the fact that she was pregnant shows that they were obviously having sexual relations. It was only when she was pregnant that she didn’t allow him to have intercourse with her, and that depressed David – or rather, it sent him into a sulk and seeking satisfaction elsewhere.

  I’ve also read and heard that she was seeing other men at this time, but this I don’t believe. It has been said that she sent him into the arms of other women, but David was responsible for his own actions. I am amazed at how many enemies Hjördis earned and how little consideration was ever given to what she went through.

  In 1986, Hjördis told me,

  After my last miscarriage I was very ill and was told I would never have children. When I had my womb taken away I felt like a part of me had been destroyed. I didn’t feel complete any more.

  I don’t show my emotions. That is the Swedish part of me, but losing my babies was shattering. It was for David too. He could show his emotions far more than I could. People thought I didn’t care, but I did. I felt like my babies had died and I was mourning for them, but because I didn’t show how I felt, people thought I was a bitch. They had no idea how much I was hurting. Only David knew. He understood that Swedish part of me.

  I had terrible depression after the miscarriage. People told me I should cheer up. I couldn’t cheer up. My soul was in darkness. But when they looked at me all they saw was a cold Swede. They thought I was just down in the mouth.

  After six weeks in hospital she was well enough to go with him to England when he made The Silken Affair at Elstree Studios. He played a dull accountant who livens up his life by cooking the books of various companies, making a failing silk stocking manufacturer appear to be a success while turning one of that company’s successful rivals into a failure, at least on paper.

  The film actually begins well but the joke wears thin, although Niven’s performance still makes it very watchable, as many of the critics noted. The Daily Telegraph thought the film ‘agreeable, civilised entertainment with enough style and wit to atone for the bits that don’t come off’. The Financial Times praised Niven saying he ‘remains one of the most accomplished light comedians in the business’, and the Daily Mail thought that Niven in this film ‘has a chance to show that when he is properly suited he has no equal in his own field of precise, polished comedy’.

  Like many of Niven’s films, it came and went and was rarely heard of or seen again.

  He took time off from filming The Silken Affair so he and Hjördis could fly to Monaco to attend the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier on 19 April. Hjördis took to Prince Rainier and they stayed friends for many years but they did not, as far as I know, have an affair.

  In May the Nivens returned to Hollywood for a five week break and then set off in June for Rome where David was to film The Little Hut for MGM at Cinecittà Studios. It was the rather saucy story of three people stranded on a desert island. Based on a rather risqué play, it revolved around a ménage à trois as the husband allows his best friend to share his wife. Stewart Granger was the husband, Ava Gardner the wife and Niven the best friend. The film suffered because it had to be toned down. But it is an engaging film, and all three stars are excellent in it.

  Stewart Granger, however, hated doing the film.

  I had to do The Little Hut because I was under contract. David wasn’t, but he accepted anything that was offered to him. Ava Gardner had to be in it too because she was under contract to Metro.

  I couldn’t bare the thought of trying to do comedy opposite David Niven’s moustache because he only has to play with it or twitch it while somebody else is talking and he steals the whole scene with no effort. That’s the genius of David. He wasn’t given credit for being a good comedian, but he knew exactly how to get the laughs. No, he stole the laughs, and I don’t blame him.

  But I was pretty inconsolable about the prospect of making that film, because of Niven’s moustache, and because it was to be shot in Rome which was a separation from Jean [Simmons] that I didn’t need right then because she was pregnant.

  It was fun to make, even if the film didn’t turn out well. Ava was very happy because she was in love with Walter Chiari who was an Italian comedian who had a part in the film. And David is always great to work with because he never lets your spirits drop. He is funny and never missed an opportunity to make you laugh.

  One day I was in a furious temper, and he said, ‘Whatever’s up, old bean?’

  I said, ‘This film is taking forever to make. I asked Mark Robson [the director] when we were going to finish because I had to get back to Jean before the baby comes, and you know what he said?’

  David said, ‘I can’t begin to guess.’

  I said, ‘He told me that he was going as quickly as he could and the baby would just have to wait. He said the baby had to wait, for God’s sake.’

  And David, very dryly said, ‘Then simply cable Jean and say, Will be home late. If I’m not there start without me.’

  For a moment I was so mad at him that I wanted to knock him on his arse, but two seconds later I burst into laughter.

  I got home just in time for the baby to be born. I sent a cable to David and said, ‘Have a beautiful baby girl. Jean did wait after all.’ He replied, ‘Congratulations Dad. Trust a woman not to be early.’

  David and Hjördis returned to England in the late summer of 1956 where he made the effort to see Trubshawe. ‘It wasn’t quite the same,’ Trubshawe told me. ‘He wasn’t talking about the old days any more and I was.’

  In September the Nivens took a brief holiday in Sweden but were back in Los Angeles in October for the premiere of Around the World in 80 Days. The film suddenly made Niven into a major star. His reputation on television was further enhanced in December by another Emmy nomination for one of his Four Star productions.

  But there was sadness on 14 January 1957 when Humphrey Bogart, who had been suffering from lung cancer, died. David went to the funeral, ushering and throwing out newspaper photographers. He spent a lot of time with Lauren Bacall to help her through the grief. That was one of his great gifts; helping people through times of grief. He did the same for me when I lost my grandfather.

  He went to work on a good film, Oh Men! Oh Women!, a comedy in which he played a psychiatrist who has a client, played by his old friend Ginger Rogers, who pours out her troubles over her husband, leading him to crack up. The Financial Times loved it, calling it a ‘shrewd and wicked farce’. The critic at the Sunday Despatch said, ‘I haven’t laughed so much for a long time.’ But the Observer called it ‘a dull consulting room comedy. The ugliest sort of fun.’

  Like almost all of Niven’s films, this one has generally dimmed into near obscurity even though it was relatively successful. The same is true of his next film, My Man Godfrey, an entertaining remake of a very good 1936 comedy about a tramp who becomes a butler. William Powell originally had Niven’s role, and Carole Lombard, as the butler’s socialite boss, had the role June Allyson now took. Somehow it didn’t quite work. As the New York Times said, ‘Maybe June Allyson and David Niven are just not Miss Lombard and Mr Powell.’

  There were further TV productions, but not so many, and he was now getting more film work coming his
way. He was eager to accept his next assignment, Bonjour Tristesse, filmed in the south of France, and directed by Otto Preminger who once again was pushing the boundaries of censorship. Niven played a middle-aged playboy with a taste for pretty young girls and has a particularly close almost incestuous relationship with his teenage daughter, played by Jean Seberg. Deborah Kerr played a former flame of Niven’s who tries to steer him away from his philandering ways. This unorthodox tale ends tragically with Kerr driving her car into the sea.

  The problem with the film is that people expected it to be another Niven comedy, but it had an edge to it, and so did Niven’s performance. The critics didn’t know what to make of it, and neither did the public which stayed away. It’s actually a film worth watching; uneven but quite absorbing, largely due to the performances of Niven, Seberg and Kerr.

  While making the film David and Deborah Kerr became firm friends – it was a friendship to last the rest of David’s life. There were suggestions that the two had an affair, but I don’t believe they did. It was just a very happy and healthy friendship.

  Hjördis initially felt threatened by the friendship, thinking in the beginning that there was more to it. But there were other reasons to be jealous. ‘After my miscarriage David said he was going to stay faithful,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t long before he was chasing after girls again. I never knew if he was having an affair with Deborah Kerr. He swore that they were not. I think that time I believed him. But he was always having affairs with other women. I felt as though I was not desirable to him any more. I wasn’t allowed to have a career, I couldn’t have babies, and I couldn’t have him to myself. Yes, I was very unhappy.’

  The final scenes of Bonjour Tristesse were shot in England at Shepperton Studios where, as soon as the Preminger film was finished, David began work on Separate Tables in November. That film was adapted from the marvellous play by Terence Rattigan who worked with screenwriter John Gay on transforming what was essentially two plays set in the same location – a hotel at Bournemouth – into one story.

  Niven played Major Pollock who turns out not to be a major at all but a seedy character arrested for molesting women. He strikes up a friendship with a plain spinster, played by Deborah Kerr; both stars, cast against type, produced impressive performances. Niven managed to make the bogus major sympathetic and was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar.

  Most critics were ecstatic about him. ‘David Niven acts out the finest role of his career,’ said the Daily Sketch.

  ‘David Niven crowns his considerably successful career with a shining performance,’ said the London Evening News.

  ‘David Niven gives one of the best performances of his career,’ said Variety.

  Filming on Separate Tables finished the first week of January 1958. In March he and Hjördis attempted to heal their ailing marriage. She said,

  We tried to fix our marriage again by having a holiday. He wanted to go around the world in 180 days, which I thought was a wonderful idea. Shirley MacLaine and her husband [Steve Parker] came with us some of the way. We had a wonderful time sailing around the Greek Islands. The boys flew out to meet us there. It was a very happy time for a while.

  But everywhere we went people knew David and they kept wanting to talk to him. We could never be left on our own. He loved it. He loved talking to people. I said to him that we were on a holiday to fix our marriage and he said that he couldn’t be rude to people who were his fans. There were a lot of female fans. I could tell they would all sleep with him if they had the chance. Of course that made me jealous. I worried that he would meet someone much younger – he loved the younger girls – and then he would leave me. I couldn’t help my moods. I had depression and I drank to ease the dark feelings.

  I don’t say these things now that David is dead to make him into a monster. He was never a monster. He was a wonderful man, and there were times when we were wonderfully happy. People didn’t always see the happy times we had because they were private times.

  When I wasn’t feeling depressed I would feel extremely happy. I would laugh and joke, and that’s when his friends liked me. My moods swung one way and then the other. When I was depressed I drank because I was so sad. When I was happy I drank just because I was so happy.

  After Separate Tables David made Ask Any Girl, a good light comedy that has long been forgotten. It featured a fine performance by Shirley MacLaine as a kooky girl who arrives in New York and goes to work at an ad agency run by a surprisingly prissy David Niven. She falls for his brother, played by the ever excellent Gig Young, to whom she is just another girl, but, of course, it is really Niven that she wants.

  Over dinner one evening with Gig Young in 1970, when I was still a junior publicist, he told me that when they were making the film Niven got Jim Backus, the voice of Mr Magoo, to call Young on the telephone and tell him, in Magoo’s voice, that he was from the Government and was calling to ask why he wasn’t in school. Young thought he recognised the voice but couldn’t place it, and then Backus said, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I see your name is Gig Young. I thought it said young Gig. In that case, you owe us 10 years’ back tax.’

  Shirley MacLaine won an award for her performance as Best Foreign Actress at the 1959 Berlin Film Festival in February, and she also won the British Film Academy Award. Niven didn’t win any awards but he did get good personal notices. ‘Mr Niven has certainly taken on a new lease of life since about four films ago,’ observed the Daily Mail. ‘This latest effort seems to confirm him as a captain and chef du protocol of Hollywood’s British colony for the next 20 years or so.’

  There was suddenly no shortage of films being offered to him, but his next was a mistake. Happy Anniversary featured him and Mitzi Gaynor – who once played his daughter – as a couple celebrating their 13th wedding anniversary which erupts into a moral storm when he confesses to his in-laws that they had been cohabitating a year before the wedding.

  ‘One wonders how players as charming as David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor ever came to be mixed up with it,’ said the Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mails film critic wrote, ‘David Niven has been choosing himself such good parts lately that I am surprised that he should consent to do Happy Anniversary.’

  It was just a blip in his career but there was worse happening in his marriage. Hjördis finally had enough of his philandering. She was supposed to go with him to the Berlin Film Festival but she chose to remain in California to be with a lover she had taken. She said to me, ‘I just thought, oh well, if it was okay for him to have affairs then it was okay for me also. His friends thought he could do no wrong. They thought it was great fun when he had affairs. One of the women I thought was a friend called me a bitch.’

  But Hjördis was with him at the Academy Awards on 6 April 1959. He was up for the Best Actor Oscar against Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, both for The Defiant Ones, Paul Newman for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Spencer Tracy for The Old Man and the Sea. When David’s name was called out, he kissed Hjördis, ran down the aisle of the Pantages Theatre, tripped up the steps of the stage onto his hands and knees, recovered and took the Oscar from Irene Dunne. Arriving at the microphone, he said, ‘The reason I fell down was because I was so loaded.’ He had intended to say, ‘loaded down with good luck charms,’ but it didn’t matter because he got the night’s biggest laugh.

  He received 230 telegrams of congratulations the next day. Among them was one from Sam and Frances Goldwyn. He hadn’t seen them for 10 years. They invited him to come and have dinner, and a few days later he did.

  Everyone was delighted for David – except for Hjördis. ‘When he won his Oscar,’ she said, ‘I felt that I had finally lost him. He was this amazing movie star, and I was just his wife. I was no one. I was not Primmie. That made me less than the best.’

  Forty years old and still very beautiful but looking thin and drawn, she decided the time had come to leave him in the summer of 1959. She said,

  I decided I had to leave him. I was miserable. I was depressed. I
felt he was not in love with me, and he said to me, ‘You’re such a cold fish at times, it’s no wonder I look to find love and warmth in other women.’ He said, ‘So you go right ahead and sleep with other men.’ That isn’t what I wanted. I wanted to feel loved. I didn’t know who or what I was any more. I was just Mrs David Niven, the bitch.

  David blamed me for having an affair and wrecking our marriage. There was a terrible argument. I think it was an argument we should have had years before. Things might have been better then. He said, ‘I’m sick of seeing you flirting with every man.’ I said that I didn’t flirt with every man. He accused me of flirting with my eyes, and I said, ‘How can I help the way my eyes look?’

  Oh, we were yelling and shouting. I felt it was good for us. He said, ‘You’re sleeping with your doctor.’ I said, ‘You’re sleeping with every actress you work with. Every air hostess. Every waitress.’ He stopped shouting then. I know now that the boys think I was a terrible mother to them, and a terrible wife to their father. They hate me because I had affairs. But nobody minded that David was having affairs. I was faithful to him in the beginning, but he wasn’t faithful to me.

  So I left him and hoped I would find happiness. I fell in love with a doctor. I thought I would be happy with him, but I missed David.

  In 1982, David told me he was prepared to take responsibility for the marriage failure. ‘After I won the Oscar, Hjördis left me, you know. I couldn’t really blame her because I took her so much for granted. And my head got too big when I won the Oscar. I thought that finally I was a wonderful actor and a really big star.