David Niven (12 page)

‘Hollywood could be a cruel place,' Niven told me in 1979. ‘If you stepped out of line, you paid the penalty. Doug's career never recovered after he married Sylvia. That was a salutary lesson I learned quickly. You can be forgiven for many things in Hollywood, but marrying the wrong person – never. I think that destroyed Doug and he died just a few years later [on 12 December 1939].'

In May, David was given a decent part in a good movie,
Dodsworth
. Based on a best selling novel, it starred Walter Huston as American businessman Samuel Dodsworth who takes his wife, played by Ruth Chatterton, on a trip to Europe where their lives change dramatically. Niven's role was brief but effective as a suave Englishman who has a
flirtation with Dodworth's wife. He had little to do but be charming, and that he did very well.

He might have thanked the film's director, William Wyler, for casting him in such a huge success, but he didn't. ‘Willie Wyler was a Jekyll and Hyde,' he said. ‘He was absolutely charming and friendly, but as soon as he placed his arse on his director's chair he became a monster. His technique was to reduce actors to shambling wrecks by making them do take after take without ever giving any direction whatsoever. He even reduced Ruth Chatterton to tears.'

I was puzzled by Niven's hatred of Wyler who had the reputation of getting Oscar-winning performances from actors. What I came to know about him, talking to many actors who worked with him, such as Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd (both in
Ben-Hur)
and Audrey Hepburn
(The Children's Hour)
was that he did put actors through take after take, but he always told them to try different things in each take, often changing his mind, even contradicting himself, getting every possible version of a scene before deciding he had the best he could get. What he didn't do, as Stephen Boyd noted when I interviewed him in 1977, was to tell actors how to act. ‘I learned that his gift isn't in
directing
actors, because he can't direct actors to act – his gift is in casting the
right
actors and letting them work through the role and the scenes to discover for themselves what they can do with it.'

Wyler agreed that he was a tough director when I talked to him by telephone in 1976. ‘I can't tell an actor how to act, any more than they can tell me where to put the camera. I choose the best actors and the best technicians, and then it's hard work for everyone. I'm not a terrible person. I get on with people, but I can't make good films being nice.'

Wyler did admit that he was ‘a lot harder on actors in the early days. I was still learning.' He spoke well of Niven, saying, ‘David Niven was still new to films, but he was
exactly
what I wanted to play that character. He was still unsure of himself as an actor, and the more takes he did, the better he got. He was
good
in the part, and that was because I didn't stifle him with too many instructions. I think, perhaps, he wanted to be told how to do it because he was still a new boy in Hollywood and quite unsure of himself.'

Niven didn't remember it being quite that way. He said, ‘It seems to me that Wyler's method was to actually destroy an actor's self-confidence – and God knows I had little to start with – and go from there. I gave so many takes that in the end I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do. Wyler would shout at me,
“Do it again! Be better!'”

Dodsworth
was a critical and box office hit.
Variety
was spot on when it
noted that the three men who played the lovers of Ruth Chatterton's character, including the ‘suave Englishman played by David Niven' was ‘a case of slick casting'. Wyler's great talent was casting the right actors.

David, forever refusing to credit Wyler for his success in the film, said that it was Walter Huston who was responsible for what he was able to deliver in his part. He said, ‘What saved me was Walter Huston and [his son] John who was working on the film. Walter Huston was a big star. A major actor. He had played in the stage version of
Dodsworth
. He knew what to do with the role, and he didn't take any nonsense from Wyler, and Wyler knew that, so he hammered everybody else
but
Huston.

‘John Huston was a scriptwriter. He worked on the film but didn't get any credit. He became a fine director, a very different director to Wyler. I think he must have learned how
not
to be a director like Wyler by watching him.'

I knew John Huston – I did some work for him in 1972 and 1974 as well interviewing him in 1981 – and he said that his father never helped David at all. He recalled that it was Merle who gave him additional help when he was making
Dodsworth
. Of course, in 1970, nobody was supposed to know about Niven's romance with Merle.

Merle continued to promote David's career and persuaded Goldwyn to cast him in her next film,
Beloved Enemy
, made in September 1937. Merle was to play the daughter of a top British civil servant serving in Dublin in 1921 who falls for an Irishman, played by Brian Aherne, but discovers that he is an IRA leader and betrays him. David had a supporting role, as her father's secretary.

There was some tension on the set because Brian Aherne was rather enamoured of Miss Oberon, and Niven was jealous of their love scenes. Merle knew that Niven was unfaithful and it seems that she took the opportunity to get even by sleeping with Aherne. David very nearly caught them, turning up at Aherne's house one afternoon while Merle was there. Niven and Aherne went for a long walk while Merle hid inside the house. Aherne told Sheridan Morley that he was sure David knew Merle was there but never mentioned her, and Sheridan told me, ‘I think Merle was thoroughly fed up with Niven's rakish behaviour and she was beginning to feel humiliated. So she taught him a lesson, and it hurt him. It didn't make for a very happy experience on the set [of
Beloved Enemy].'

Like almost everyone else in Hollywood, John Huston was aware of the ‘secret' romance between David and Merle, and he told me about it in 1974. ‘I thought they made a wonderful couple. David was kind of an outdoors man. He liked playing tennis and fishing, and once or twice he and I sailed out and caught some marlin. Merle wasn't too keen on that, but she liked to play tennis and golf. And she went to watch him play cricket.

‘I wasn't a part of mainstream Hollywood, so I wasn't at all the big society events that Niven and Oberon attended, but he would tell me how he and Merle had dinner with the Colmans. They'd go up to a ranch Colman owned where a good many couples who were either cohabitating or just having an extramarital fling would spend time. I myself enjoyed a few weekends there and met them there one time. I was with a rather nice young actress I was quite infatuated with, and David and Merle wanted us to join them on a picnic.'

Huston's enduring memory of Niven was that he was ‘a wonderful storyteller – I can tell a few tales myself – and he and I swapped stories'.

There was a particular story Huston told which David especially liked. When Huston was a young man he went to Mexico City by mule train from Acapulco and got fleas. After the first few days of travelling three Mexicans with guns came into camp and asked for tobacco and food and which they were given. Then they asked for ammunition. Huston and his companions gave them some but they wanted more. The bandits left but began shooting into the camp. There was a brief gunfight and then another the next night. The captain of the mule train left four men to set an ambush for the bandits. One bandit was wounded and got away, one escaped unharmed and the third they captured, turned him over to the
rurales
at the next town, and he was duly executed. It was a story Huston wrote into
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.

Niven loved Huston's story and told him about his own time in Mexico when his visa had run out. He added some spice to his story, saying that while he was there he taught the local rebels how to use various firearms. Huston told me, ‘I knew this wasn't true because I knew a little about the Mexicans, but I let him tell his tale because he told it so well.'

David said that while he was instructing these rebels a notorious Mexican bandit rode in and asked him to join his band of outlaws and he politely refused. He told the outlaw leader, ‘Sorry, old bean, but I'm rather tied up with the local peons and their cause for liberty,' to which the bandit responded by opening fire on him. There was a gun battle, and Niven said he thought he had got shot in the arse but it turned out to be just a splinter from a nearby tree which was shattered when gunfire hit it.

Huston told me, ‘He had Merle and the young lady I was with enthralled by this escapade which I knew was a complete fantasy, but he made it sound so funny. He painted this picture of how they had to take down his pants and remove this splinter from his ass which he claimed he kept as a souvenir of the time he nearly died in a shootout in Mexico. I asked him where he kept it. He said, “I'll show it to you when we get back to Los Angeles.”

‘Some days later he turned up with a six-inch [15cm] wooden splinter attached to a piece of string which, he said, he hung on his bed post at night. That's when Merle realised he wasn't being entirely truthful and playfully slapped him on the ass.'

Huston said that about a year later he was having dinner with a couple of Hollywood writers, and one said, ‘Did you hear about David Niven's adventure in a Mexican mule train. He got covered in fleas, and then the outfit was attacked by Mexican bandits.'

As Huston said, ‘That was Niven; he loved to tell a good story, and if he heard one that might be better, he'd end up telling that as well. But he told that story of mine to the wrong person though, one time. He told [Humphrey] Bogart who listened very politely, laughing in all the right spots, and when David had finished telling it, Bogie said, “You know, David, I was
in
that movie. You should have seen it. It was pretty good. It was called
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. John Huston wrote and directed it.” And David, without batting an eye, replied, “That's the trouble with John Huston. You tell him a marvellous story and the next thing you know he's turned it into a movie.”'

Huston had originally let me in on the Niven/Oberon secret in early 1974. When I saw David next, which was in October 1974, I told him that I knew who the Great Big Star was and that it was John Huston who gave the game away. He said, ‘Keep that to yourself,
please
. Merle wouldn't be happy at all if it got out. I
knew
I shouldn't have trusted that big Irishman. He told me stories of gunfights with Mexican bandits. Of course, I didn't believe a word of it.'

David shared the shock felt by the whole of Hollywood at the sudden death of Irving Thalberg on 14 September 1936. He was just 37. His widow, Norma Shearer, asked David to be an usher at the funeral. She thereafter became a recluse but was visited often by David who was one of the very few friends she would agree to see.

In October, to David's horror – and also Goldwyn's – Merle announced to a news agency that she and David were going to get married. It seems he had finally decided he would marry her after all. She had told him she was prepared to forgive his sins if he settled down with her permanently and stopped his philandering. ‘He must have agreed in a moment of passion,' John Huston said. ‘I can imagine him saying, “Yes, darling, anything you say,” as she brought him to the brink of ecstasy. I dare say he regretted it the moment it was all over.'

I think Huston could be right. Whether it actually happened that way or not, David wouldn't have agreed to marry Merle for any rational reason, and certainly not just so he could win her forgiveness for all past deeds. As
Michael Trubshawe told me, ‘Nivvy couldn't be faithful to any of his wives. If he'd married Merle, he would never have been faithful to her, no matter how much he loved her.'

I suspect that David intended to renege on his marriage acceptance and was mortified to find that before he had found a way to do so, Merle was making public announcements of a forthcoming wedding. He must have made a conscious decision not to bring it all to a sudden end because she was still helping with his career.

Laurence Olivier wasn't convinced that Niven wanted to get married. He told me, ‘There's no doubt in my mind that Merle wanted to marry Niven, but he wasn't keen to settle down. I don't think they would have been happily married. David didn't want a wife who was a film star. He wanted a wife who would stay at home. Merle pined for him for many years and she believed she and Niv would have been very happy.'

John Huston said that a marriage between David and Merle would ‘probably have ended in disaster. That's the way it is in Hollywood. But for a while they would have been deliriously happy. Merle was good for him. He never would have been an actor if it wasn't for her. I think she made him as good as he was in
Dodsworth.'

Following newspaper reports of their impending wedding, Goldwyn made them both write denials of any engagement.

David rarely spoke to me about Merle Oberon, but in 1982 he had two things to say about her. The first was, ‘She made me into an actor. I couldn't do the bloody thing. But she taught me. She helped me when I made
Dodsworth
while Wyler just sat reading a copy of a Hollywood trade newspaper without even watching me and just kept repeating, “Do it again!” If it wasn't for Merle, I would never have made it as an actor.'

The second thing he said was, ‘You know, I have just a few regrets. One of the biggest is not marrying Merle when I had the chance.'

There's no doubt in my mind that David carried a torch for Merle to the day he died.

—

B
efore the year was out, Niven managed to fit in one more film,
We Have Our Moments
. He was on loan to Universal, not at that time one of the biggest of studios. The film was very much a B-picture, made only as a supporting feature running just over an hour. He played one of a trio of crooks who frame a school teacher on a European cruise. It was a frothy little comedy, and David earned some fair reviews for his efforts.
Kine Weekly
called it a ‘preposterous but entertaining story', in which ‘Thurston Hall, David Niven and Warren Hymer mix effectively as the crooks'.