David Niven (31 page)

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.

‘I knew I had to save the marriage somehow, if not for my sake then for the boys. I don't think they thanked me for saving the marriage. They didn't like their stepmother too much. When we separated, I reached the point where I really missed her. I tried the old fashioned way of sending her flowers. But I didn't think it would work and I found someone I felt I could be happy with.'

I asked him who that someone was, and all he would say was, ‘She was
a beautiful English model.' He is known to have fallen for a model from a good English family at the time. Her name was Caroline Kirkwood. I asked him why he didn't divorce Hjördis and marry his girlfriend. He said, ‘She was very young. I didn't want to be an old man with a young wife.' Caroline was 27. David was 49. He always liked the younger women, but he seemed to think that he couldn't be married to one.

David took the two boys on a holiday to Honolulu to stay in a house owned by Frank Sinatra. According to Ava Gardner, David wasted no time bedding every girl who was willing, ‘and they were
all
willing', she said.

Back in California, Hjördis continued her affair with the doctor. ‘I'm drawn to doctors,' she told me. ‘Almost all my lovers have been doctors.'

I asked her why she thought that was. She said, ‘I suppose it was because I think I need someone who can help me be well again. I spent much of my life trying to be well again.'

Patricia Medina remembered visiting Hjördis during the time she was separated from David. ‘She had friends round who were
all
drinking heavily. I didn't like the look of them at all.'

Hjördis admitted that, having lost so many friends who were really David's friends, she was looking for friends of her own. ‘But sadly the people I thought were my friends were just like me. They drank too much. They were destructive for me, but I didn't know that at the time.

‘I was friends with Pat Medina, but we had some rows. She saw what a mess I was in, and when I was living apart from David she came to my house, and she saw all these people I thought were my friends, and she hated them, and she told me she wanted to leave.'

Back in Hollywood, David made
Please Don't Eat The Daises
, a comedy in which he played a professor who decides to become a theatre critic in New York. Doris Day played his wife who convinces him to give up reviewing plays and write them instead. It received a critical lashing at the time but it is actually a very funny film today. Maybe the film critics of the time didn't like the way Niven portrayed theatre critics as the ‘butchers of Broadway'.

After three months apart, David and Hjördis got back together. Patricia Medina said that she only went back to him because he was making a lot of money from Four Star and she wanted some of it.

Hjördis denied that. She said,

When I went back to David I had an argument with Pat. I didn't explain myself at all well, but I made it seem like all I was interested in was his money. I was trying to say a joke – that I missed him
and
his money.

I knew that if our marriage was to work the second time he had to stop sleeping with women, and he promised he would. I promised not
to sleep with other men, but I said, ‘I can't promise not to flirt because my eyes just flirt on their own,' and that made him laugh.

The biggest problem, though, was my drinking. I was getting drunk too much, too often. David said to me, ‘You're damaged, and I don't know how to mend you.'

I said, ‘Just love me and we'll try and find a way.'

Many of David's friends disapproved of the reunion, but he had come to realise how sick she was, and I think that is partly why he tried to mend the marriage. He said, ‘I tried to protect her when we got back together. I tried to be gentle with her because she had become very fragile. Some of our friends were a bit rough on her because they didn't understand what was really going on inside of her head. And they were always
my
pals and so they tolerated her, but they didn't like her much. Peter Ustinov, a great pal, told me that he was very sorry but he didn't like her at all. I said, “You have to understand, Peter, that she's been through hell, and she's very ill.” He said, “If she's ill have her committed.” I never heard Peter say such a cruel thing before.'

David believed their marriage stood a better chance of survival if they got away from Hollywood. He was also considering how he could keep more of the money he earned instead of giving so much of it away to the IRS. He was making around $200,000 a film and making good money from Four Star, but he was landed with a huge tax bill and that helped him make up his mind to move to Europe.

Deborah Kerr and her husband Peter Vietrel encouraged him to live in Switzerland where they were living and where tax was much lighter. Early in 1960 David and Hjördis flew to Switzerland to house hunt and to search for a new future.