David Niven

by Michael Munn

  When he recovered from the infection he began a daily exercise regime, walking across country, swimming and skiing. In the town he was welcomed by the locals, often without Hjördis who usually remained at home. When she did go to the Palace Hotel to play gin rummy, she relied on people to pick her up at the front door of her house and get her to the front door of the hotel.

  She recalled, ‘I would play gin rummy with the few friends I had, but I embarrassed them and everyone because I would suddenly see someone I had never met before, and I’d throw myself at them and kiss them. I was out of my head. David’s friends told him I was trying to make him jealous. Maybe I was. I was angry at him. I should have dealt with it much better. I was overcome by compulsions to do these crazy things.’

  David now chose to accept films made in Europe because they were so easy to get to and from, and in early 1961 he went to Italy to make The Best of Enemies, a World War II tale about an uneasy alliance between a British patrol, led by Niven, and an Italian group of soldiers, led by Alberto Sordi, in the Ethiopian desert. It was a comedy of sorts, directed by Guy Hamilton. Michael Trubshawe had a tiny part, and when he fell ill from the heat, David moved him into his own air-conditioned hotel suite. Niven was always there for a friend when the chips were down.

  The film came and went without much fuss or attention. The critics agreed that Niven was perfect for the role. ‘Sandhurst-trained David Niven never lets down the light comedy side of officership,’ said Time. The Sunday Times described Alberto Sordi as ‘the jewel of the piece’ but added, ‘One should never underestimate David Niven. He is still one of the most durable of polished comedians.’

  When filming was over he returned to Château d’Oex and spent his free time painting and collecting works of art. He hired a butler, an Italian called Bernado who always wore a long white jacket. ‘He looked like a milkman,’ David told me. ‘I thought he looked so funny that I bought him several coats just like that so he would always have one to wear.’

  On 18 March 1961 Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt died at the age of 92. David had had little contact with Sir Thomas in recent years and he chose not to go to the funeral, although Grizel and Joyce both went to the memorial service at St James’s in Piccadilly. In 1970 David told me, ‘When Uncle Tommy died I felt nothing at all. He had never really been a part of my life.’

  But in 1982 he said, ‘I didn’t realise how hard it would hit me when he died. I couldn’t let anyone know how I felt, but it was like losing my father all over again. I hardly knew either of my fathers. I think losing him – my real father – made me sadder than when the man I had thought was my father died. I wasn’t devastated, you understand, but suddenly I was aware that the man who had, frankly, brought me into the world had gone, and it made me think about him and what could have been. It made me think a lot about life and death, family and friends. I knew I had to learn to appreciate more of what I had.’

  I think that David regretted that he had never been closer to his real father. Although he dismissed him as his Uncle Tommy and a rather unloving stepfather in his autobiography, David had helped Sir Thomas protect his secret and I think he might well have done that on purpose. There was also, undoubtedly, some bitterness David felt at never being allowed to have a genuine, loving father in his life.

  During the summer of 1961, the Nivens, including the boys, went for a holiday to the Côte d’Azur in the South of France. David rented a house there called Lo Scoglietto which was perched on a small peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean. He and Hjördis loved it so much they bought it. She seemed to improve when she was there. She said, ‘I felt happier than I had in years. I thought I would get well again, but then David had an affair with a local girl.’

  David just couldn’t resist the pretty girls and this time the affair had serious consequences.

  CHAPTER 20

  —

  The Secret Child

  In 1970 David told me, ‘I thought it would make Hjördis happy if we adopted a child. We talked to friends about the idea and they thought it would be marvellous. Hjördis said she’d love to adopt a Swedish girl, so we did. Her name was Kristina.’

  For many years David and Hjördis kept a dark secret. I learned of it in 1982 when David told me, ‘She was my own daughter. I want to tell the truth, but I have to do it by writing it as a novel. I couldn’t resist a pretty girl. And I was no longer having relations with Hjördis. That part of our marriage was over.’

  His novel told the story of a divorced author living in Switzerland who has an affair with an 18-year-old schoolgirl. ‘I was going to write how this girl had the author’s baby. It was my way of releasing the guilt I have over Kristina. But I can’t do it. I can’t finish it.’

  He allowed me to read some of it. It was based on his own affair with an 18-year-old girl in Château d’Oex who had a baby by him – a little girl. David didn’t want the baby to grow up as an unwanted, illegitimate child, but neither did he want to risk a scandal, so he came up with the idea of having Kristina formally adopted by himself and Hjördis. I think the fact that he chose not to shirk his responsibility as a father, even by subterfuge, is admirable. It also reflects his own experience, being brought up as a stepson to someone who was his actual biological father. And I’d like to think, knowing David as I did, that he felt the pull of his own bloodline in that baby which made it impossible for him to reject her. He didn’t want to do what Clark Gable had done to his daughter, Judy, by Loretta Young, or what his father had done – he didn’t want to deny his own child’s existence.

  He told me that for some time, he and Hjördis had discussed adopting after it became impossible for her to bear children of her own. Suddenly the need to adopt was very urgent when the girl David had an affair with became pregnant. David knew he had to tell Hjördis the truth and he made her promise never to tell anyone – not even Kristina. The effect upon her was devastating, but she said she felt she had no choice but to go along with the ruse.

  I felt so miserable when I learned the truth. Nobody knew what I was feeling. They all thought I was just a drunken bitch. I became a drunken bitch. I had to pretend that I was happy to adopt Kristina. But she was his child by another woman. But, you know, I can look back and realise that he was trying to do the right thing for everyone. He wanted to help the mother of our baby girl, and he wanted me to have a child to raise. His intentions were good. But it all came from his infidelity.

  He was so afraid that somebody would know the truth that we kept the adoption a big secret. We wanted Kristina to have a normal life, as normal as is possible when you are David Niven’s daughter. Wherever we went in the world, we made sure we were never photographed with her. At airports, she never walked through customs with us. She was always behind us with friends.

  When we broke the news that we had adopted her, we said that we were just trying to protect her from the paparazzi. But we were trying to hide the truth.

  I tried to cope with everything – all the secrets and the lies. The stress was incredible. I had a hard time dealing with it, and I drank more and more to try and cope, but it didn’t make the problem go away. It just turned me into a hopeless drunk again. I was an alcoholic.

  Kristina had been born in Geneva on 4 June 1961 and was only a few weeks old when David and Hjördis adopted her. Kristina may not have been Hjördis’s very own child, but she came to love her very much.

  Because of the success of The Guns of Navarone, David was in demand. There were fewer television appearances now and after playing a small gag cameo in the last Bing Crosby/Bob Hope film, The Road to Hong Kong, as a Tibetan monk, he made a good drama, The Guns of Darkness, set in a South American republic where, as a British planter, he tries to help the expresident escape from the rebels. His leading lady was Leslie Caron who he didn’t get on with, but he worked hard to give director Anthony Asquith a good solid performance. ‘I didn’t want to be thought of all the time as a light comedy actor,’ he told me. ‘I had the confidence to try other kind
s of roles.’

  The Financial Times noted, ‘David Niven seems continually to improve as an actor.’ The Daily Mail said, ‘The planter is such a convincing figure, a man in agony because he sees and asks too much, that you never think of him as David Niven until the film ends.’

  Christmas 1961 started a tradition of spending the winter in Château d’Oex and having Noël Coward and his partner Cole Lesley and their friend Graham Payn over for Boxing Day. Hjördis remembered, ‘The best times were Christmas when Noël and Cole and Graham came. Noël always gave me good advice. He helped me get off the pills and to cut down on my drinking, but it would never last.’

  The summers were spent at Lo Scoglietto which, over time, became David’s favourite of his two homes. ‘I miss England,’ he told me, ‘but I can’t afford to live here. The Hollywood I knew has gone. My home is on the Côte d’Azur and in Switzerland.’

  Early in 1962 he filmed The Captive City, playing a British officer who becomes trapped in a hotel in British liberated Athens when Greek partisan groups attack the city. It’s one of Niven’s many forgotten films, but not a bad one.

  In April Hjördis suffered a horrendous skiing accident. She said it happened because a strange man had been staring at her, and as she skied passed him he whispered ‘I love you’. She turned to look over her shoulder to see if he was following and hit a tree. She was knocked unconscious and broke her leg in 15 places.

  I asked her how, as an agoraphobic, she was able to go out skiing. She said, ‘I was on medication to calm me down which helped, and I was in one of my better times when I could go out. There were days when I felt quite well, and others when I couldn’t step out of the door or even get out of bed. I had my niece staying with us and she wanted to go skiing and I wanted to make the effort.’

  Despite their crumbling marriage, David was beside himself with worry that she might die and had her flown to Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford in England where she remained for nine months.

  In June 1962 he flew alone to Madrid, Spain, to start work on Samuel Bronston’s epic about the Chinese Boxer rebellion of 1900, 55 Days at Peking. It starred Charlton Heston as an American Marine Major, and Ava Gardner as a Russian Countess. David had the role of the British envoy in Peking. It was perfect casting all round – Heston had to be believably heroic, Ava believably beautiful and Niven believably British.

  Bronston had spared no costs, building a massive reproduction of Peking on the Spanish plains of Las Matas. The sight of it impressed Niven the moment he saw it. ‘It was staggering,’ he told me. ‘It had everything – the streets, a river, the compound, the Empress’s palace. You could get lost in that place. I’d never seen such a realistic set before, or one so huge. It was like the real thing must have been in 1900.’

  He remembered touring the Chinese streets with Ava. ‘You could go in and out of shops and houses. And everywhere there were real Chinese people. Bronston had emptied every Chinese restaurant in Spain for his Chinese extras. Ava and I managed to get lost and so I thought I’d ask one of the Chinese extras for directions. I knew some very basic Chinese and thought I did a fine job but he didn’t understand a word I said. So Ava spoke to him in very good Spanish and he was very happy to show us the way. These were, of course, Spanish-speaking Chinese.’

  Although the sets were up, the script was far from ready when they began filming. ‘Some of the dialogue was unspeakable – I mean, literally,’ David told me. ‘Chuck [Heston] and I were rewriting most of our lines to make them sound like real dialogue.’

  The responsibility of trying to get his actors to work from a script that was still coming out of the typewriter each day was director Nicholas Ray. ‘It was an impossible task for him,’ David told me. ‘So impossible that he got his wife Betty to write the script. She was a marvellous choreographer but scripts she simply couldn’t write. I left it to Chuck Heston to demand that Betty Ray leave the script alone which Nick Ray was rather upset about, but not as upset as Betty was when Chuck told her that her dialogue was complete shit. I have always admired Chuck for that.’

  Heston said that working with David was one of the few undiluted pleasures of making 55 Days at Peking. ‘He’s a different animal to me. I bury myself in the history of a film like this while David plays the part as written and does it very well. I would say that in that kind of a part he was as good as Alec Guinness and maybe even better than Laurence Olivier could have been, which is saying something.

  ‘We were at a Press gathering – we had a lot of those – at the Bronston studio, and I was earnestly explaining at great length the politics of the Boxer Rebellion to some weary journalist, and I overheard David at the next table talking to his journalist who was roaring with laughter, and I heard David say, “Of course, if we get involved in the politics, we’re lost.” I thought to myself, why can’t I just do that? He’s a lovely, funny man.’

  Niven, as usual, took it upon himself to keep everyone’s spirits up with plenty of laughter. He recalled,

  It was a brute of a production. I was lucky. Most of my stuff was indoors, speaking diplomatically while Chuck fought the Chinese Boxers on the walls. But I did insist that I have one good action scene and I convinced Nicholas Ray to let me be a part of a scene where we blow up an armoury.

  He looked at me and said, ‘David this is tough stuff to do. You could get hurt. Chuck knows how to do this kind of thing.’

  I said, ‘If I have this right, all I have to do is run like hell before the whole thing explodes, yes?’

  So he said, ‘Okay, you’re in the scene.’ We shot it at night, and I was standing with Chuck as we waited for the moment when we lit the fuse and then ran like hell, and I said to him, ‘Look, Chuck, I’m getting a bit too old for this sort of thing so don’t run too fast or I’ll just get left behind.’

  He said, ‘Don’t worry, David, I’ll make sure I don’t get ahead of you.’ We were given the signal for action and I took off and left Heston standing. When he caught up with me, he said, ‘I thought you said you couldn’t run fast.’

  I said, ‘My dear Chuck, I said I’m getting a bit too old. I didn’t say I couldn’t run fast.’ He looked bemused for a few moments then laughed loudly and said, ‘Let’s do it again but this time I’m racing you.’ So we did it again and the scene looked splendid.

  Without Hjördis in tow, David should have been able to enjoy the comforts of the local Spanish girls, and he may well have, but what I do know for sure is, he spent a lot of personal time with Ava. I know this because she told me. ‘David was lonely in Madrid, and so was I. He was worried about Hjördis in hospital and he flew back to England every Sunday to see her. I said to him, “David, you can have any girl in Spain. What’s stopping you?” and he said, “I’d feel guilty knowing Hjördis is in a hospital bed.” So I said, “How about spending time with me then? Would that make you feel guilty?” He said “Just a little bit.”’

  I later told David what Ava had said – over lunch in 1980 with him and Lynne Frederick – and he admitted, ‘Well, we were old friends and despite many years of trying I had never had any luck with her, and all of a sudden she was inviting me into her bed so I couldn’t say no, could I?’

  To his astonishment, I replied, ‘You could have?’ That was the one time David got irritated with me. He expected all his male companions to see his sexual adventures as great sport.

  I recall that he frowned and said rather sternly, ‘The trouble with you, Mike, is you’re so bloody virtuous.’ Then, looking slightly embarrassed and, I think, looking for a way out of the hole he had just dug for himself, he took Lynne by the hand and said, ‘I know you’re only just widowed, my dear, but see what you can do about seducing him, for God’s sake,’ to which she replied, ‘I have and he won’t.’

  He looked at me, shocked, and asked, ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘Being married,’ I said. He just didn’t understand that.

  Back in 1962 while making 55 Days at Peking, David and Ava needed ea
ch other for more than a romp in bed. They were both shocked when they heard the news that Marilyn Monroe had been found dead. Frank Sinatra had telephoned Ava with the news and had told her he was launching his own investigation because he wasn’t convinced it was the suicide the police were dismissing it as.

  Ava once told me that David said he felt terrible because he had used Monroe like so many other men in Hollywood had, and he was shocked to think she might have killed herself because of the way she had been treated in Hollywood.

  As for Ava, she was fearful for Sinatra, and she became anxious, tearful and at times irrational on the set. Many, especially Charlton Heston, saw this as unprofessional behaviour, and he and Nicholas Ray grew impatient with her. Then, on 11 September, with more than a month still to go on production, Ray had a heart attack. It wasn’t fatal but he was unable to finish the picture. Second unit director Andrew Marton concentrated on the battle scenes, of which there were many and didn’t involve Niven, and Guy Green arrived to take over the film. David helped Ava pull herself together and she surprised Heston by behaving more professionally. He thought she was feeling guilty about Nick Ray’s heart attack, but her change in behaviour was due in large part to David’s patience and kindness to her, given in private, even in bed.

  55 Days at Peking was generally derided by the critics at the time it was released in 1963 but, like many of the super productions of the 1960s, today it stands up as a fine example of epic film making that has become a lost craft; many of today’s critics who are used to computer generated images that create explosions and extras in their thousands, are impressed at what the film makers of the past were capable of achieving.

  His next film, The Pink Panther, oddly enough, doesn’t stand up so well. It is, of course, the film that introduced bumbling Inspector Clouseau created by Peter Sellers. But Clouseau was only a supporting character. David Niven was the star, as jewel thief Sir Charles Lytton, known as ‘The Phantom’. Niven began work on it, in Italy, as soon as he had finished helping to defend Peking for 55 days.