David Niven (34 page)

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 each 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.

The Pink Panther
wasn't as funny as it might have seemed on paper and its
saving grace was Sellers as Clouseau. It is Peter Sellers' contribution to the film that made it a success which both pleased and irritated David. He told me, ‘I thought this was going to be an improvement on the Raffles idea, and I was going to get to play a Raffles character in a major film made by a good director. We had beautiful Capucine and Claudia Cardinale, and we had Robert Wagner who became one of my very best friends, and we had Peter Sellers. But as I watched him on the set and saw how Blake Edwards [the director] would go into uncontrollable laughter on every take, I knew I was not going to win. It was Peter Sellers' film. So I took the money, bent over and took it like man. The film was a hit and I was in it which counted.'

Over the lunch I had with David and Sellers' widow Lynne Frederick in 1980, David told us, ‘I remember Peter coming to me and saying, “Look here David, this idiot I'm playing is going to ruin this picture and I don't know what to do about it.” So I said, “Are you mad, Peter? You're the best thing in this film.” He said, “But maybe I should do it differently. I should get Blake to reshoot all my scenes.” I said, “Don't you dare. I need a hit film. I'm counting on you.” He wasn't at all sure I was right. But look what happened.'

The film was a huge hit and David was right about Sellers. As the film critic in the
News of the World
observed, ‘I never thought someone would steal a picture from that old professional David Niven, but it's happened, so help me.'

The film spawned several sequels featuring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, all of them an improvement on the original, concentrating on Sellers' genius as the bumbling French detective. For David, alas, it was his last success for a while as he made a series of mediocre films that could have brought his career to a premature end if it wasn't for one thing – his tremendous success with his first autobiography.

—

H
jördis returned home from hospital early in 1963. It had been a long stay but she had been treated for more than just her physical injuries. David told me, ‘She needed help with her drinking and anxiety problems. She was getting through so much vodka but then she started on that awful Fernet Branca. The place would smell of Fernet Branca. She loved that terrible stuff.'

I had no idea what Fernet Branca was until Hjördis told me in 1986. ‘It's a very strong alcoholic drink. I was told it would help to clean my system, like some kind of drain cleaner.' She laughed and said, ‘What a fool I was.'

Her long stay in hospital did do her some good. ‘I was getting some very good help then, not just for my broken leg,' she said. ‘I was getting help for my depression and anxiety. So I was there for many months, and David came to see me every Sunday, but I was on my own the rest of the time while he was spending the summer playing around again, having flings with young pretty girls.'

I don't believe she ever knew about David's affair with Ava in Spain but she was well aware that he was seeing other women. ‘I got my revenge,' she said. ‘Jack Kennedy wanted a quickie, and I gave him a quickie.' This happened, apparently, when the Nivens went to the White House in Washington to join in the celebrations for President Kennedy's 46th birthday. Hjördis said, ‘He gave me a disease. Chlamydia. It taught me that revenge is not the solution. After that I just got worse. Drinking more, rejecting David. I felt like I was tumbling downward and didn't know how
to get back up. Sometimes I was able to pull myself together and behave when we were with other people.

‘I tried to behave with the boys. I tried to get on with them. The best times were when David was away filming. But when he came home for the weekends, we quarrelled. I think I had become so suspicious and jealous of what he would have been getting up to that whenever I saw him come home something inside me just made me want to be angry at him. But I think I got on well with the boys when he wasn't there.'

JFK had his birthday bash and a quickie from Hjördis during the time David was making his first film in America since
Please Don't Eat the Daises. Bedtime Story
teamed Niven with Marlon Brando. The off-beat casting generated a great deal of publicity and the two actors got on remarkably well. Niven kept Brando laughing throughout production and David said he enjoyed making the film. ‘People think Marlon has no sense of humour,' he told me. ‘He has a
wonderful
sense of humour. He told the funniest stories and was never anything but pleasant and friendly.'

They played conmen preying on attractive women. The critics hated it. The
Daily Express
called it ‘the most vulgar and embarrassing film of the year'. The
Observer
noted, ‘The film was shot, unfortunately not fatally, by Clifford Stine.'

In September David joined Charles Boyer, Robert Coote, Gladys Cooper and Gig Young in New York to launch a new Four Star series called
The Rogues
. They each played members of an international organisation of conmen preying on the rich all over the world. It was a tremendously successful series in which David appeared in seven episodes. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed doing it,' he said, ‘because I was able to play a part that was both Raffles and The Phantom from
The Pink Panther
, and this time I was able to do a good job of it.'

The Rogues
was the last TV drama Niven did for 10 years as he spent the rest of the 1960s going through a series of films that ranged from mediocre to downright awful. In
Where the Spies Are
in 1965 he played a British secret agent called Dr Jason Love. It was made when producers were cashing in on the success of the James Bond films but this was a poor imitation, although Alexander Walker of the London
Evening Standard
liked it; ‘A vintage star as engagingly witty and implausibility-proof as Mr Niven is worth any Bond-man's arsenal of booby-trapped accessories and machine made death traps. I welcome him like a flesh-and-blood transfusion in a kind of film that is now tottering under the weight of its own gimmickry.' The film wasn't successful enough to spawn sequels.

Lady L
starred Sophia Loren as a woman who goes from being a poor laundress to a rich widow. David played one of her numerous lovers, and
his friend Peter Ustinov wrote and directed the film. It proved to be an expensive flop.

The films got worse.
Eye of the Devil
in 1966, co-starring Deborah Kerr, was a horror film which the
Sunday Times
said was ‘hilariously bad'.

Worst of all was
Casino Royale
, an unofficial James Bond movie made as a comedy which nobody understood. John Huston, who directed some of it, never understood it, neither did Peter Sellers, nor George Raft or Orson Welles who were among the cast members I personally knew, and neither did Deborah Kerr and David Niven. It was, said the
Guardian
, ‘a big colourful, noisy, star-studded, plot-less junk pile of a mess'.

There followed
The Extra ordinary Seaman
in 1968, an anti-war satire. Marjorie Bilbow writing in
Today's Cinema
said, ‘Anyone looking forward to David Niven, Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rooney will be sadly disappointed.'

David co-starred with Deborah Kerr again, in
Prudence and the Pill
in 1968.
Time
called it a ‘cretinous comedy', and the
New York Times
said of the stars, ‘because their parts are unendurable they give the worst, worst performances of their lives.'

Niven was accepting anything offered to him just for the money.
The Impossible Years
in 1968 was about the generation gap which the
Times
thought to be ‘of a dreariness which not even the usually saving presence of David Niven and Lola Albright, as the troubled parents, can alleviate'.

Before Winter Comes
in 1969 saw him as a British officer running a refugee camp in Austria in the spring of 1945.
Time
was unimpressed by what it considered to be ‘vague plot, conventional camera-work and a feeble scenario'.

He went to France to make
Le Cerveau
, known in America and Britain as
The Brain
. Niven played a gentleman master criminal and the brain behind the British Great Train Robbery.

David had no excuse for making such bad films other than for the money. ‘I needed to pay for the lifestyle I enjoyed,' he said to me. He particularly enjoyed lavishly entertaining people at Château d'Oex and also on the Côte d'Azur. He was at his happiest when friends came to visit, but despite Hjördis's long stay in hospital, she had deteriorated again and was becoming an embarrassment.

‘I have always enjoyed entertaining guests,' he said. ‘I like to have lunch parties at home. She started leaving the table before anyone else and going to her room. She hardly ever ate. I don't understand how she hasn't starved herself to death. Eventually she stopped coming down to join me and our guests.'

Hjördis denied that she starved herself, although she did grow thinner. She didn't know it at the time but she had an eating disorder. ‘Of course I
ate,' she said in 1986. ‘I had a good breakfast every morning, but not much else in the day. Food would make me feel sick.'