David Niven (2 page)

The second interview in September 1975, when I had just started my journalistic career, was about his second book of memories and anecdotes,
Bring on the Empty Horses
. In 1976 I interviewed him on the set of
Candleshoe
at Pinewood Studios. The next year I interviewed him at the time of the paperback publication of
Bring on the Empty Horses
.

Interviews with Niven were always wonderful, hilarious experiences. He related his many funny anecdotes which seemed to change from one interview to the next, but he just wouldn't talk about films. He usually said, ‘I never talk about my films. That's so boring,' and then he'd always launch into one of his funny and probably not altogether truthful stories.

But in 1978 I took him completely by surprise by telling him I didn't want to interview him ever again. It happened on the set of the World War II drama
A Man Called Intrepid
when he found me with his co-star Barbara Hershey engaged in conversation in a sound stage complete with sets but bereft of cast and crew as it was lunch time. He seemed his old perky self at first and said, ‘Hello, old man, what brings you here?'

‘I'm interviewing Barbara.'

‘Not going to do one with me?' he asked jovially. Obviously he expected me to say I would.

‘No,' I said, and his face changed. He actually looked shocked.

‘Why ever not?' he asked.

‘Because you won't tell me the things I really want to know.'

My response seemed to sink his spirits like a stone. I hadn't realised it but he was in something of a depression and I wasn't helping through what he perceived to be my lack of interest in him. But as a result of my frankness, he took me aside and after discussing the matter, he said that he would answer all of my questions if I interviewed him. So I agreed, and did two interviews with him, the first back at the Connaught Hotel that evening where he invited me for dinner, the second the next day back at the studio where I asked him if he would talk frankly about the war, something he had never done. But he did for me, partly, I think, because of the subject of the film he was making and also because I related some of the war stories director John Huston had told me.

I think he had always thought of me, like he did a lot of journalists, to
be a private audience for him to entertain with his many hilarious and often outrageous anecdotes. One of his favourite journalists was Roddy Mann who also happened to be his good friend. Comparisons of the stories told to different journalists often revealed different versions. His intention was simply to improve on any one story to get the biggest laugh. ‘I simply love making people laugh,' he said to me once. ‘A day without laughing is a day wasted.'

Even when cornered and forced to tell a more honest version of humorous events, he still made me laugh. But, although he didn't seem to know it, Niven's real world was every bit as entertaining and rich and fascinating as the one he'd invented.

In 1979 I interviewed him when he was making
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
. Because he was always so bright and cheerful, I challenged him to talk about the things that really made him angry – I called it
Niv's Most Angry Interview Ever
, and intended to publish it in
Photoplay
. It resulted in the darkest interview I ever did with him. I decided to shelve it as I felt it wasn't the right time to reveal some of his darker moments in a fan magazine.

In 1982 came the last interview, done at his request, which proved to be the most revealing, shocking and emotional of all the interviews. It was a dying man's confession.

My first interview with him, in 1970, was by far the longest – it was spread over three days during which he told me the story of his life. On the first day, when I was alone with him in his suite, coffee arrived, I turned on my tape recorder, and we began.

—

A
ccording to my research material he was born in Scotland, so I began my interview with, ‘You were born in Scotland,' which was hardly the most probing way to begin an interview, but it at least started at the beginning.

‘Yes, old boy,' he said. ‘At Kirriemuir. We moved to London after my father died in the Great War in 1915.'

In one sentence he had moved swiftly from mentioning his place of birth to talking about his father's death. I now realise he didn't want to dwell on his place of birth. And with good reason. He wasn't born in Scotland but in London and it was a source of embarrassment to him that he had been saying for years that he had been misleading everyone about his place of birth. In fact, he made no mention of his birthplace at all in
The Moon's a Balloon
, published a year after I first met him.

However, it was Niven himself who, in 1978, told me he was born in London. It slipped out over dinner at the Connaught Hotel, in a moment of reflection. He said, ‘I do
love
London. I suppose one never stops loving one's first home.'

I said, ‘I thought you were born in Scotland.'

Without missing a beat he replied, ‘Oh, you don't want to believe all that old tosh. That's old,
old
studio publicity. They lied through their teeth. Thought it would make my life sound more interesting. Maybe it does. I don't know.'

I decided not to remind him that it was he who had told me that old tosh eight years earlier. It is true, however, that his early studio publicity played
fast and loose with the facts of his life. They did with a good many film stars back in the 1930s.

‘Sometimes even
I
can't tell which is real and which is studio tosh,' he said.

I think there was actually some truth in what he said about him not always knowing what was completely true, but he certainly benefited from playing fast and loose with the facts, making a fortune from writing the most entertaining autobiography ever penned by a Hollywood film star. David's greatest talent was telling a good story and not letting facts get in the way, so he had often talked happily of his Scottish ancestry. The truth was, his father was born in London, and his mother, who was half-French, in Wales.

He was born 1 March 1910 in Belgrave Mansions, in Grosvenor Gardens just around the corner from Victoria station. It's an area of London where many film and TV stars have lived, and over the years I've often been in the neighbourhood to visit actors either socially or to conduct interviews or discuss some other business.

For many years his place of birth had been given as Kirriemuir in Scotland. When he died, some obituaries named Scotland as his homeland. Even
The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia
still puts Kirriemuir as his birthplace.

I think it was Sheridan Morley who first revealed publicly that David was born in London when he wrote his excellent biography of Niven,
The Other Side of the Moon
, in 1985, but by then I already knew that. Sheridan told me once, ‘I think David came to believe many of the fictions that either he or the studio came up with. He acted as though he wasn't sure where he was born, but I think he chose to gloss over that subject.'

When I asked David how his father died, he said, ‘There was a battle with the Turks. My father was a second lieutenant in the Berkshire Yeomanry which went ashore at Sulva Bay in Turkey. The Turks had laid barbed wire in the sea, and there was machine gun fire as they tried to get ashore. Most of them were killed. My father's body was never found.'

He said that he heard the news of his father's death when his family was living at his father's house, Carswell Manor, in Berkshire. ‘He was a landowner, you see,' David said. ‘Before that we lived in Scotland – after I was born.' They did actually live in Scotland. ‘We had all the trimmings; a butler, footmen, gamekeepers, maids. My father was rich when I was born, but he lost a good deal of his money backing the wrong horses. He had his own bookmaker too. So some of the land had to go. But he kept Carswell Manor. That's where I was, with my sister Grizel, when we heard the news our father had been killed.'

David's account can't be true because William Niven sold Carswell Manor in 1910 to help pay off debts he had run up. The family moved to a farm in Cirencester and then to Fairford Park in Gloucestershire by the time war broke out in 1914, and it was most likely there that David lived when the news came.

It doesn't really matter where David was when he heard of his father's death, and I don't think Niven was purposely lying. He was, after all, only five when the news came, and the family moved about a lot.

When I asked him if he could remember how he felt upon hearing of his father's death, he said, ‘I don't think it made too much of an impression on me. I hadn't seen that much of him. Children were seen but not heard in those days. So I was little seen or heard by my father.'

In 1982, he told me, ‘My father was not my father.'

That didn't so much as take me by surprise as shock me into silence for what was probably only several seconds but seemed like minutes. I said, ‘What do you mean?'

‘My father – my
real
father – was Thomas Platt. He'd long been in love with my mother.' Thomas Walter Comyn Platt was a Conservative politician.

David's mother was Henriette Degacher. She came from a long line of British military officers on her mother's side. Her grandfather had been a general, so had her great uncle. Her father had been a captain who fought in the Zulu wars.

She had given birth to three children before David was born; Joyce who was 10 years old when David was born, Henry [nicknamed Max], who was seven, and Grizel who was three. ‘I don't know if they really were my father's children,' David said. ‘I mean by that, if they were Thomas Comyn Platt's. I think Joyce and Max were William's. But they didn't look like Grizel and I. I always thought she and I looked like Thomas.' David had always referred to Thomas Platt as ‘Uncle Tommy'.

‘My mother wasn't completely unhappy when my father died,' David said. His feelings about his mother were often mixed. When he was a child he was convinced that she didn't care for him, and there were times in his life when he maintained that she didn't love him.

He said, ‘She was very beautiful and quite unconcerned with me. I never saw a lot of her. Grizel and I were looked after by our governess. We had a wonderful lady called Whitty who loved us and brought us up. My mother was too busy, but what with I couldn't say. She didn't seem to do
anything
.

‘If she was busy it was probably with lovers. She flirted outrageously and showed more attention to other men than she ever did to me.' David
would often claim that he was brought up in near poverty. ‘After my father was killed, he left everything, including his debts, to my mother. She was just able to afford a house in South Kensington [in London]. She had rather a merry crowd of young men about her, and Uncle Tommy was foremost among them. He got knighted [in 1922] and he hyphenated his last two names, so he became Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt. But we called him Uncle Tommy. He'd been around mother for many years and they got married.'

The wedding was in May 1917 at the House of Commons' own parish church St Margaret's, in the grounds of Westminster Abbey.

David remarked, ‘Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt was not a stranger to my mother even when she was with my father.'

I asked him just how long Platt had been around Henrietta and he said, ‘Since 1904, at least. He wrote love letters to her.'

‘What makes you think he was your real father?' I asked.

‘For a start, I look more like him than I ever did my father.'

‘But have you proof?'

‘My God, yes. He didn't like having me around, that's for certain. Grizel and I were a nuisance. She and I have always been close. Right from our childhood. Max was a fine chap, lots of fun, but he was off to join the Navy when Platt married my mother.

‘I'm afraid I didn't care for Joyce. She was always telling Grizel and I what to do. She was the oldest and very bossy. I used to think my mother didn't like me because she once told me, “I wish you'd never been born.”'

‘She actually said that to you?' I asked.

‘Just the once. I had got in her way and she said, “You are the only mistake Tommy and I ever made.” I was eight and didn't understand what she meant at the time. It's as clear as crystal to me now.'

I asked him if he was sure that's what his mother had said, and he answered, ‘I never forgot it. I didn't understand it when she said it, but I never forgot it. Grizel also believes he was our real father.

‘He once said to me, the last time I spoke to him during the war, “I'm as proud of you as any father could be.” I saw a look in his eye. It was the look of a proud father. Officially he was my stepfather. But a
real
father looks at you with a very different eye. And then he said, “You know our secret, don't you?” and I said, “That you're my father? Yes, I do.” And he said, “I hope you understand why we could never tell anyone, what with my position as a Member of Parliament.” I said I understood perfectly, and we parted on good terms.'

That was in contradiction to what he had written in
The Moon's a Balloon
when he maintained that he last saw Sir Thomas before he went off to
Hollywood and that there had been some unkind words from Comyn-Platt and they never saw each other again. All his life, David had kept up the pretence about the true nature of his relationship with Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, but as he edged towards the final months of his life, David Niven was revealing the truth.

I asked him, at that time, if he thought William Niven had known. ‘I have no idea,' he answered. ‘I've often wondered that and I've talk to my sister about it. We just don't know. And it's something we agreed to keep to ourselves.'