Pieces of My Heart (30 page)

L
ike me, Jill St. John is a Hollywood kid. Her dad ran a very successful bar and restaurant in Westwood, and Betty Lou Oppenheim, her mother, created the Screen Smart Set, a program through which people donated clothes and furniture to the Motion Picture Home in return for a tax deduction. The Home raised more than $8 million because of Betty Lou’s idea.

Natalie and Jill knew each other, but not well. Nat and Jill were kids in daily ballet class together, both with ferocious stage mothers. (Stefanie Powers was in the same class!) Jill’s mother got her into radio by the time she was six, and she was making movies when she was a teenager. When we were married the first time, Natalie and I would say hi to Jill and Lance Reventlow, her husband, and as my career at Fox slowed down, hers was heating up. Jill was a leading lady to some major stars: Sinatra, Dean Martin, and, of course, Sean Connery in
Diamonds Are Forever
. We had worked together in
How I Spent My Summer Vacation,
and
Banning,
not to mention the pilot for
Hart to Hart,
and the association had been pleasant but purely professional, despite the imaginings of my wife, Marion.

Jill and I first went out for dinner with Tom Mankiewicz and my daughter Kate about six months after Natalie died. A few days later, I called Jill and asked her out. She got flustered and said she’d call me right back. Then she immediately called Tom Mankiewicz.

“RJ asked me out,” she said. “Should I go?”

“Well, if you don’t, someone else will,” he replied.

You can’t argue with logic like that, so Jill and I started seeing each other.

I don’t particularly like being alone. I’m one of those men who likes being in a relationship—it centers me. As we spent time together, I realized that Jill brought many things to the table. There was a sense of kismet in what happened between us. Whenever we’d run into each other in the past, one or both of us was in love with somebody else, so neither of us ever particularly contemplated the other’s potential. But now we seemed to be finding each other at a time when we were both alone. Besides that, we were at similar stages of our lives. I’m ten years older, but we’re both old enough to have loved and lost, so we valued each other all the more.

I found that Jill was remarkably empathetic; she understood what I was going through, perhaps better than I did. She had lost Lance Reventlow, with whom she was always close even after they divorced, in a plane crash. She had known and liked Natalie. We knew a lot of the same people, we were from the same era, we understood the same music.

From the beginning, we were comfortable with each other, and that is something that only gets better with time. From the beginning, both my mother and my sister also thought the world of her, which served as a confirmation of my own instincts.

While Jill and I were slowly discovering each other, the uproar over Natalie’s death continued. The promise I had made to Paul Ziffren—to not acknowledge anything that was written or broadcast about Natalie’s death—was immensely valuable. Of course, I was aware of what was being said, but I tried to ignore it.

There was only one thing that truly enraged me: the stories that I had somehow conspired to kill Natalie. That was the last straw, and I wasn’t going to take it quietly. Finally, Jill called Henry Kissinger, whom she’s known for years, and Henry called me. He explained that, legally speaking, I had little recourse. He talked about the things that had been written about him, some of which were nearly as crazy as the things that were being said about me. The sense of the conversation was “this too shall pass,” and it helped me get past my reflexive outrage.

Jill never pressed me for any kind of definition in our relationship. She was there, with her hand under my arm. She let me vent and be what I needed to be. She didn’t try to put lights on the Christmas tree, she was just there for me and the kids, with no expectation of return. She loved me, or she wouldn’t have stayed, because at this point I was lugging enough baggage to fill a 747 to Heathrow. I was a heartbroken man who was drinking too much and just trying to get through the night, every night. I had three kids who were also reeling. I wasn’t exactly a catch.

Although we started going out about six months after Natalie died, it probably took two or three years before I could look at her and really see her. I do not believe I would be alive today without her. There’s a reason my pet name for her is “Magic.” Jill is very bright, very caring, and has what I can only call a gift for life. She is, for example, a wonderful gardener. She
tends
things. She’s also a superb Cordon Bleu–trained chef. Soon things started happening for us together.

It was Jill who helped me find the house the kids and I moved into. The belief had been growing in me for some time that the Canon Drive house was too permeated with Natalie for the girls and me to ever be able to make a fresh start. I started looking for an alternative.

Cliff May was a developer and architect who had basically invented the California ranch house, with the sliding glass door leading out to the backyard. Because of my father’s interest in California real estate, which he passed on to me, I was aware of the community of houses Cliff had built near Will Rogers State Park. Cliff had started building the houses in 1936 or so, and the house Cliff built for himself was the one I bought.

It’s a long ranch house on two and a half acres. The living area is in the center of the house, and the seven bedrooms and the office spike off from the center. There was room for the kids as well as Willie Mae, and there was plenty of room to build a perfect cottage for my mother. And there was a stable for horses—the most therapeutic of all animals. The house is just minutes from Hollywood, but it feels rural; around the corner, there’s a neighborhood riding ring for working with the horses. It’s not pretentious, but it is comfortable. From the beginning, it felt like home, and for more than twenty-five years that’s what it was.

The house had been featured in
Architectural Digest
in 1946, when Cliff May was still living in it, and those photographs show nothing but forest around the house. The magazine categorized it as a “Modern Ranch House” in “Riviera Ranch, West Los Angeles,” which is fair enough, although now it’s just Brentwood. But ranch houses didn’t have some of the beautiful rounded adobe features of the entry, or the rural feel that the land gave the house.

Unfortunately, the house had been altered over the years, and some of its charm and beauty had been lost, but Cliff was still alive when we bought it, and I asked him to restore it. Cliff was a fascinating man, very romantic, in love with Mexico and women, some of whom he married. I’m glad I got to know him.

In late 1982, the girls and I moved in…slowly. It was another wrenching experience. Natalie had decorated the Canon Drive house so very carefully, so very beautifully. I couldn’t bear to just pull up stakes all at once, so we moved out gradually. We would drive over to the new house, perhaps paint a room and move in a few pieces of furniture. I told the girls that they could take any furniture they wanted from the old house for their new rooms; if there wasn’t room in the new house and they still wanted it, I told them I would keep things in storage until they had houses of their own and could reclaim the pieces that carried such memories of their mother.

And if the Brentwood house wasn’t enough, Jill opened up Aspen for me. Jill had lived in Aspen since the mid-1960s, when it was a slightly down-at-the-mouth silver mining town in the process of becoming a world-class ski resort and you could pick up lots for $750. The people who lived in Aspen were highly educated, although most of them didn’t have a lot of money. But they loved the arts and they loved the mountains, and long after everybody became quite wealthy because of the skyrocketing value of their land, they continued to be devoted to the extraordinary environment and atmosphere.

I fell in love with the town at the same time I was falling in love with Jill. Finally, in 1995, we bought property there, and three years after that we completed the house we’d planned and built together.

The house that had been on the seven and a half acres was small, almost Bauhaus in style, and it had nothing to do with its surroundings. We built a different structure, higher, more open, with a lot of windows that brought the house into the world of the mountains that lie beyond our veranda. The house has bare timbers and is surrounded by trembling aspen trees and spruce. You can’t see any other houses from ours, so there’s a feeling of splendid isolation in the view, and the atmosphere is serenely western. Surrounded by the trees, Jill’s collection of Russell Chatham paintings, and the twelve-foot Tiffany window, I am at home.

I think that Jill and I found each other at the right time. There have been none of the tensions that arose in my other marriages, and I think that’s because when you find someone at our stage of life, you’re much less likely to do anything to derail trust. Jill is a man’s woman, and I’m lucky she chose me to be her man. And whenever we have to go somewhere, she’s packed and ready before I am, and with fewer bags. Unfortunately.

Our favorite times together have been on fishing trips or the various times we’ve gone to Europe. There have been driving trips through France and four or five trips to Paris, where we love walking around the Ile St. Louis or the gardens of the Rodin Museum—my favorite place in France. These times together contain nothing fancy, nothing pretentious. The hotels are out of the Michelin Guide, the food is bread, cheese, and wine, and it all fills my soul.

M
y friendship with David Niven never weakened. We spent many happy days on his sailboat, the
Foxy,
around Cap Ferrat. We’d fish for sea bass and dive for sea urchins, which he ate as if they were popcorn. For liquid refreshment, David hung bottles of white wine over the side of his boat so that the Mediterranean would keep them cold. He also had a taste for
loup de mers
and would tell me, “We have to catch them here before they go across the border and become bronzino.” The secret to David’s personality was that he loved life as much as he loved to work; the secret to the love that people had for David was not just that he was quick, clever, and witty; it was that he had a gift for friendship like few people I’ve known.

David’s house at Cap Ferrat was called Lo Scoglietto, and it was near a little medieval village called St. Paul de Vence. Niv adored his house, and he adored the sunshine and the flowers that grow in such profusion around Cap Ferrat. He was so sentimental about living things that he would walk around his pool fishing out bees and wasps so they wouldn’t drown. He ordered his life around summers at Cap Ferrat, and he flatly refused to take any film that would interfere with his lifestyle.

His personality never changed, not even after he was struck by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. Despite his weakened physical condition, he retained the wonderful joie de vivre that always came through in his acting. Jill would say that even after he could no longer speak intelligibly, he could still make her laugh, because his eyes were still alive with his personality and she could tell what he was trying to say.

On one level, I don’t think he ever got over Primmie’s death. By the time David was diagnosed with ALS, Hjordis was a total alcoholic, and not a quiet one. They had adopted two girls, Kristina and Fiona, in order, I assume, to try to give the marriage more of a foundation, but it never seemed to me that Hjordis had any feelings for David at all. Why he stayed with her, I’ve never understood. I thought a divorce was in the offing at one time, around 1977, but then one of the girls had a very serious auto accident, and he felt that he couldn’t leave his family. The woman he had been seeing was English, about thirty-five, and loved to sit at his knee and listen to the uproarious stories David could tell so well. She adored him, and to see David with her, as opposed to Hjordis, was to see a flower open to the sun.

Even marinated in alcohol, Hjordis retained much of her beauty, but she had a bleak, dark, driven personality, and his invariable response was to do everything he could to placate her, to no avail. When he was diagnosed with ALS, I told her, “Hjordis, you have to be here for David now; he needs you.”

Her response was a simple declaration: “I never loved him anyway.”

My reaction was a combination of shock, anger, and despair. As long as I knew them, Hjordis never gave any indication that she did love him, although if ever a man was deserving of love, it was David. It’s possible that he stayed with her because a divorce would have been very expensive, but his attitude toward her didn’t seem based on finances. It was more like he was doing penance. But for what?

While the disease had its way with David, Hjordis was elsewhere—drinking, having affairs. In the spring of 1982, we went to France to shoot
The Curse of the Pink Panther,
which Blake Edwards put together as a last hurrah for the series. Niv played his old part, I played my old part. It was just a couple of days of shooting, but we all wanted to do it for David. After he did his last scene, he said, “I’m afraid you’ve just seen the last of an actor who had quite a career.” Tears came to my eyes.

Unfortunately, the ALS had slurred Niv’s voice. Before a take, he would work at enunciating the dialogue clearly, sounding it out syllable by syllable, but when the camera was rolling a word like “gorilla” would come out “golilla.” Blake felt he had to dub David’s voice with Rich Little, who didn’t sound anything like David, which made the situation that much worse. Niv was terribly distressed; it’s one thing to acknowledge a disease privately, but to have its effects paraded before the whole world is something else entirely.

Niv had always intended that
The Curse of the Pink Panther
would be his last movie, but the fact that Rich Little’s dubbing job became a matter of public knowledge meant that it was no longer David’s choice.