David Niven (10 page)

‘How did you know about that?' David asked.

‘He was bragging about it last night in a bar. He figured that because you're a limey nobody's gonna give a fuck what happens to you. To tell you the truth, as an Irishman I couldn't give a fuck about an Englishman, but you're okay and I hate to see you end up in the morgue which is what's gonna happen when you don't pay. So we're gonna fix things.'

David asked him what he had in mind, and all O'Hara would say was, ‘Just try not to worry.'

David recalled, ‘That was easier said than done. I'm due to be bumped off the next day, and I'm not to
worry?'

He described the next day as ‘one of the worst days of my life because I thought it might be the last'.

He finished the day's work on the studio backlot and after the extras were dismissed, he was on his way to return his costume and collect his $2.50 when the two hoods caught up with him and, taking him by the arms, forced him to a quiet corner and said, ‘Now pay up.'

David recalled, ‘I was shaking, really ready to pee in my pants, and I told them I only had twenty-five dollars and it would take more time to get the rest.' They took his $25 and David hoped he had a reprieve, but then they grabbed him and dragged him off to somewhere even quieter. He told us, ‘I thought,
This is it. I'm a dead man. But I'm taking at least one of them with me
. I knew unarmed combat and I was going to put it to the test.'

Suddenly O'Hara and half a dozen other guys, all extras and all Irish Americans, appeared; they'd been keeping an eye on David. They told him to clear off, which, he did, he said, ‘without any further persuasion'.

He didn't see Gerry for a week or so, but when he did, he asked what had happened to the two hoods. O'Hara told him, ‘You don't want to know.' David recalled, ‘And he said it like I really
didn't
want to know.'

Then O'Hara told David that he and his friends were leaving Hollywood to go to Ireland. ‘Ah, going back to the old country, eh?' asked David.

O'Hara laughed and said, ‘Aye, that's right, to drive the bloody English out. We're going back with a few things we need,' and then he imitated firing a rifle. David suddenly realised they were with the IRA.

He said that he became desperately worried and went to the British consul and told him what had happened. The consul said they could handle this in two ways. One way was to bring in the police and the FBI because the chances were that the two gangsters were dead and that would put Niven in a difficult situation and he could say goodbye to his Hollywood career.

David said, ‘What's the other option?'

‘You can walk out and go home and not say another word and stay away from whores in future.'

‘But what will
you
do?'

The consul said, ‘I'm going to have lunch with some VIPs.'

‘But those men are heading back to Ireland with weapons that will be used on our soldiers.'

The consul said, ‘Calm yourself. Our men in Ireland will be patrolling the coasts, watching roads, as they always do. There'll be nothing we can do to find these friends of yours so let our boys do their job. You were in the Army, weren't you?'

‘Yes!'

‘Then have a little faith in our soldiers. And keep your mouth shut. You've done all you can do. Thank you, Mr Niven, and goodbye!'

David said he despised the IRA and felt guilty that he couldn't do anything to stop those men, but he said he also had a sneaking admiration for them because they probably saved his life.

He wondered what happened to Eddie who he never saw again. Ava
told him, ‘That guy must have been a soldier in the Mob and running a scam, and once his cover was blown, he just got out of there.'

David said that he later told Clark Gable the whole sorry episode, and Gable said to him, ‘Why the hell didn't you say, for crissakes? I would have given you the full amount.'

David said, ‘I'm sorry, Clark, but I really only wanted what I thought was going to be the best blow job in town.'

Gable said, ‘Jesus, David, if that's all you want, I can
tell
you where you can get that, and it won't cost you a dime.'

David told us, ‘Dear old Gable, he understood.'

Ava said, ‘Yes, and knowing Clark, he
did
know the girl in Hollywood who gave the best blow job.'

David continued to sign on each day as an extra, hoping for more work and maybe a break that would turn him into an actor. But he knew the chances of that were next to nothing because every extra in Hollywood, hundreds of them, all wanted to be movie stars. But Niven had the advantage of friends like Edmund Goulding who found him an agent, Bill Hawks who in turn got David a screen test with Claudette Colbert for her next movie,
The Gilded Lily
.

There were two other actors also being tested, Ray Milland and Fred MacMurray. Milland was another British actor in Hollywood, having made steady progress since arriving there in 1930.

I interviewed Milland in 1980 in London. He remembered David Niven's early days in Hollywood. ‘He was without any acting ability and I think he knew it. He was always ready with a funny anecdote but in front of a camera he dried. I don't think it had dawned on him at first that there would be other actors from Britain; maybe he thought he would be the next Ronald Colman. In fact he became very friendly with Colman, but he was nervous and I think jealous with other British actors in Hollywood and with a background in stage and British films. I wasn't around him very much, but when I was I felt that he was giving me the cold shoulder. If you weren't a big star, he didn't want to know you.'

It didn't help Niven's confidence when both Milland and MacMurray got the parts they tested for
and
a contract at Paramount while David was shown the door. Shortly after that, he was signed to a contract by Samuel Goldwyn, one of the most powerful independent producers in Hollywood.

The story of how David came to be signed by Goldwyn is almost apocryphal. David always said that Thalberg decided to give him a tiny part in
Mutiny on the Bounty
, playing one of the mutineers, but there is no evidence he appeared in the film. A rumour spread that Thalberg was about to put David Niven under contract to MGM, which created sudden
interest from other studios. If there was a rumour, I suspect that David started it. The rumour got Samuel Goldwyn's interest and he signed David before anyone else could. That was Niven's version of events.

Another account that I read said Goulding persuaded Goldwyn to take a look at David's one and only screen test and Goldwyn decided that was enough to sign him up. But the screen test, by David's own admission, was pretty awful.

I asked Loretta Young if she knew what happened, and she said she did. She told me that her mother advised David to play tennis regularly with Frances Goldwyn, Sam Goldwyn's wife. Loretta's mother knew that Frances would immediately like David, and she persuaded her husband to give David a break.

David once said to me, ‘I suppose I got signed because Frances Goldwyn liked me.' He had got his start in movies because Sam Goldwyn was just pleasing his wife.

David might well have been considered by Thalberg. Niven told me, ‘I was good friends with Irving Thalberg. He said to me once, “I could have done better things for you than Goldwyn.” I had to tell him, “Then why didn't you say something before I signed with Goldwyn?” He said, “I would have but you rushed into that contract while I was producing
Mutiny on the Bounty
, but I would have got around to it. Tell you what, when your seven years with Sam is up,
I'll
sign you.” By the time my seven years were up, Irving had died.'

It was late February 1935 when Goldwyn signed David to a seven-year contract, starting at $125 a week, a fortune to David back then. His salary would increase to $150, then to $200 in the third year, and then by a hundred each year until he was earning $600 in the seventh year.

For the rest of his life, David had very mixed feelings about Goldwyn. He told me, ‘Without Goldwyn, I might never have made it. Or that's what he wanted me to believe. I think it's possible that I could have done better at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But I did have a career, and I suppose I should be thankful to Goldwyn for that. He could be very kind, and sometimes he was very generous, but then he made a lot of money by loaning me out to other studios. I remember when I told Ronnie Colman I was going to work for Goldwyn. Ronnie was just leaving Goldwyn, and he was horrified. He told me that Goldwyn was by far the best producer in Hollywood, but he could be a real bastard. Well, he
was
a bastard at times. But maybe you have to be a bastard to be a successful producer in Hollywood.'

Whatever kind of man Goldwyn was, he got David started in movies. That's a lot more than most other extras in movies ever got.

—

D
avid was able to afford to pay Al Weingand his bill and then move into a small house on North Vista. He told me that he was so overjoyed at his new-found wealth that he rushed out and bought a car for $500, only then to discover that his contract allowed Goldwyn to lay him off unpaid for 12 weeks every year, and that his annual 12 weeks unpaid layoff had started with immediate effect. So he had to return his car.

I wasn't totally convinced about this so I mentioned this tale of David's misfortune to Joseph Cotten when I interviewed him in London in 1980; Cotten had been under exclusive contract to David Selznick, another of Hollywood's powerful independent producers, and he said, ‘I think Niven has spent his life thinking up things he can say about Sam Goldwyn. It's all garbage! An unpaid layoff was never a part of any contract from a major independent or studio. Men like Goldwyn and Selznick survived by loaning out their stars for considerable amounts of money and they couldn't afford for a studio to ask for a contract player only to be told, “I'm sorry but he's on a 10 or 12 week layoff and can't work.”

‘You were
employed
by the studio, and you negotiated when you could have time off, all paid for at your usual weekly rate. No, I'm sorry, David Niven was never put on an immediate layoff. I knew Sam Goldwyn. He was a very good, very shrewd producer. He would have been wanting to loan Niven out and make some money from him from the moment he signed him.'

David often made out that Goldwyn was a cruel tyrant, telling me in 1970, ‘Goldwyn told me he wouldn't be looking for work for me and I had
to find it myself. So I put the word about that I was under contract to Goldwyn and waited for the offers to trickle in.'

But Goldwyn
was
finding David work, at Paramount, in
Without Regret
. Elissa Landi was the star, playing a woman who escapes from bandits in China and unwittingly becomes a bigamist. Goldwyn secured David sixth place in the billing, despite the fact that he delivered only one line, ‘Goodbye, my dear.'

It was about this time Merle Oberon arrived in Hollywood. She had become the biggest female movie star in Britain and was under contract to Alexander Korda, the Hungarian born British based film producer who was very powerful in the British film industry. In 1935 Goldwyn bought a share of her contract from Korda to star her in American films, and so Merle arrived in Hollywood to star in
The Dark Angel
.

David's affair with Oberon continued in the US but Niven never spoke publicly of this throughout his life. When he wrote about it in
The Moon's a Balloon
he tried to disguise her identity by referring to her as a ‘Great Big Star'. But it was an open secret in Hollywood. Laurence Olivier had seen the romance kindle just a few years before in London. ‘By the time I arrived in Hollywood,' he told me, ‘Merle and David were very much in love. He'd changed a great deal since I first saw them together. She was obviously a big help to him professionally, teaching him how to behave with more confidence for the camera, and she was able to get him to deliver his natural charm for the camera. He was likeable and natural on screen, which is as much as any successful screen actor needed to be.'

David and Merle spent weekends up at San Ysidro, a ranch owned by Ronald Colman and Al Weingand near Santa Barbara, where many friends of Colman and Weingand carried out their secret rendezvous. There Merle coached David for the camera and then persuaded Goldwyn to use him in
Barbary Coast
. He didn't get billing at all, but as a Cockney sailor thrown out of a San Francisco brothel during the gold rush of 1850, he delivered one line as he was being pushed out of a window. Nobody heard what he said as his line was lost amid the general noise of the scene but David said that his line was, ‘Orl rite – I'll go.'

Merle's private coaching paid off when he was tested for a small speaking role in
A Feather in Her Hat
and got the part. Goldwyn would have collected a good fee from Columbia for the loan of Niven for this film, and David would have received his usual hundred dollars a week salary. At this stage of his career David didn't care too much, or even think a great deal, about how Goldwyn made money from loaning him out. All he cared about was actually getting a part where he had a scene in which he was the centre of attention as a witty poet enlivening a literary party.

The film featured a British actress, Wendy Barrie, who would later become one of gangster Benny ‘Bugsy' Siegel's girlfriends. David took her dancing a number of times; she was just one of numerous actresses and starlets he went dancing with. In 1975, when he was in London promoting
Bring on the Empty Horses
, he said to me, ‘I used to go dancing a lot with the girls I met in Hollywood. Of course, the word “dancing” is just a synonym for something a little more intimate, you understand.'

The fact that he was seeing Merle didn't prevent him from ‘dancing' with many other women.