David Niven (14 page)

Niven spent time at San Ysidro ranch with Virginia Bruce, whom he
was still seeing, and they also enjoyed the hospitality of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at their grand and legendary San Simeon castle.

He had also begun an affair with Norma Shearer. For him, she would emerge from her reclusive shadows, and they often dined and danced. Dancing, as Niven had told me, often involved a lot more than moving around a ball room.

Goldwyn next loaned David out to Paramount to co-star with Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert in
Bluebeard's Eighth Wife
. Niven's role was brief, as a charming and elegant foil to Cooper who played a much married millionaire. The film didn't do well, being made at a time when America had little sympathy for millionaires. ‘In these days it's bad enough to have to admire millionaires in any circumstance,' wrote the film critic of the
New York Times
, ‘but a millionaire with a harem complex simply can't help starting the bristles on the back of a sensitive neck.' That critic did, however, feel that the film was ‘enlivened by the supporting presence of Edward Everett Horton, Herman Bing, David Niven and Warren Hymer'.

Although David was still with Merle Oberon, now back in the US, as well as seeing Virginia Bruce and Norma Shearer, he saw the New Year in with Loretta Young, along with Ronald Colman and some other Hollywood luminaries at a mountain resort at Lake Arrowhead.

Niven enjoyed the Hollywood life to the hilt: ‘There was nothing like it, old bean, if I wasn't filming, I was at Ronnie Colman's or at San Simeon, or skiing.'

He discovered a great love for skiing at the new ski resort at Sun Valley in Idaho. He recalled, ‘My instructor was a nice young fellow called Marti Arrougé. I called Norma Shearer from there and she was so desperately lonely that I said, “Come and join me,” and when she met Marti, who was 12 years younger than she, they fell in love and got married.'

Niven moved out of his bungalow and, with Robert Coote and an Australian fortune hunter called Walter Kerry Davis, rented one of Marion Davies's guest cottages on Ocean Front at Santa Monica. Flynn, still one of Niven's closest friends, occasionally stayed with them whenever his marriage was going through yet another sticky patch. Douglas Fairbanks Jnr also moved in for a while, and in March 1938 Noël Coward came to stay, and although they'd met before, this visit established a friendship with Niven that lasted until Coward died. The house on Ocean Front was a place of fun, laughter, booze and girls.

Merle Oberon had not completely given up on David, and she was able to get him a part in a film she made with Gary Cooper,
The Cowboy and the Lady
, but every one of his scenes was cut from the film for reasons not at
all clear. David thought it was because he was ‘so bloody awful in it'. That was bad news because other producers suddenly lost interest in him.

Loretta Young came to his aid, persuading director John Ford to cast him in
Four Men and a Prayer
in which Loretta starred as an American girl in love with one of four brothers whose father, a British colonel, played by C. Aubrey Smith, is court-martialled. David played one of the colonel's four sons.

Loretta's love interest in the picture was played by British actor Richard Greene, a new arrival in Hollywood and one which David eyed with some envy. I interviewed Greene in Norfolk in 1981, and found him to be frank about his uneasy working relationship with Niven. He told me,

Four Men and a Prayer
was not only my first film in Hollywood but my first film,
period
. Niven was rather put out that I was coming in with what was the lead male role – that is, I was the one who got Loretta Young – while he had been working for four years or so in Hollywood and still wasn't getting top billing. I quickly noticed that he would look at me –
glance
at me – rather enviously and suspiciously.

He wasn't unpleasant to me when we spoke, although he didn't speak to me much at all when we weren't in front of the camera. I thought he seemed rather nervous, as if I was the opposition and he was afraid I would be better than him. I suppose that was his own lack of confidence as an actor. He made up for it by being the life and soul of the party, telling endless anecdotes in a state of never ending good cheer and bonhomie. But I could never figure out what was really going on behind that grin of his. I felt that he'd smile at me and be thinking, ‘Who do you think you are, you bastard, coming onto my territory and thinking you can be better than me?' Well, I never did think I was better than he, and I can admit that he was the one who went on to greater stardom than I ever did.

I would like to have liked him more but I could tell that he didn't like me, and we never got together much after that. We saw each other at social events, but we were never great pals.

It was apparent that he didn't much care for me being overfriendly with Loretta Young even though it was only for the film we were making. I think he must have been in love with her – he certainly seemed jealous, or maybe it was just that he was jealous that I was her love interest and he wasn't.

But despite all that, at the wrap party he shook my hand and said, ‘I think you have a wonderful career ahead of you and I wish you the best of luck.' All the same, I couldn't be sure if he was sincere or not. I'd like
to think he was, but I think he could be very shallow. I heard and saw him talk to some people like he was their best friend, but when he walked away from them his smile disappeared and he'd say something terrible about them under his breath.

During that interview, I told Greene that David had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, although I didn't say what it was as it hadn't been publicly announced that he had Motor Neurone Disease. Shocked by this news, Richard Greene said, ‘I really should write to him.' I don't know if he ever did. Not long after I interviewed him, he had a fall and suffered head injuries that resulted in a brain tumour that killed him in 1985.

Niven admitted to me once, ‘I wasn't the nicest of people in Hollywood to start with.' In 1980, when he was in London for Peter Sellers' memorial service, he talked about how actors – Sellers in particular – were so insecure that they could be ‘real bitches'. He said, ‘Before the war, just as I was getting some success in films in Hollywood, I was so insecure that I saw every new English actor who came along as a threat to me. I felt that some of them just turned up and had instant success while I was jumping through Goldwyn's hoops.'

He also admitted that he made an effort to get on with the established stars ‘because they were the ones it was important to get on with', rather than the newcomers. He said, ‘I suppose it was shallow of me, but that's what show business can be like. I'm lucky that I do have some truly wonderful friends, and have had many, but there were and always are plenty just waiting for you to fall.'

Four Men and a Prayer
was not destined to be a classic John Ford film.

Loretta Young did her best for David, landing him a major supporting role in her next picture,
Three Blind Mice
. This time he got the girl – but not for long, as the leading man Joel McCrea won her in the end. Loretta played one of three sisters who all inherit $5,000 and decide to invest it in finding them all rich husbands. Niven, as a playboy, and McCrea, as a man of high society, vie for the affections of Miss Young and Niven wins until she discovers he is just a pauper and she ultimately winds up with the wealthy one. I suppose there is a moral in there somewhere, but for now it eludes me.

When I talked to Loretta following Niven's death, she remembered him as ‘a great friend and a really ambitious actor, though one who struggled to be good'.

I asked her if she felt she had contributed to his success considering that she did get him work in several of her films. She said, ‘I hope I helped him some of the way. Sam Goldwyn wasn't doing much for him at that time.
He was just loaning him out and taking good money that other studios paid for him but Goldwyn still only paid him his weekly salary. It was difficult to cast David because he was a certain type of Englishman, and there weren't that many parts being written like that. He had to just sort of fit in wherever he could, and I convinced my studio [Twentieth Century-Fox] to put him in good supporting roles in my films. At best, that made sure he kept working.'

I told her that David had expressed how a number of people like her had actually helped him in those early days, to which she replied, ‘We all loved David. That was the great thing about him – he was very easy to love.'

And that opened the door for me to ask her if she and David ever really were in love. She said, ‘Oh yes, we were. We even talked about getting married, but he didn't want a movie star for a wife. I said, “That's good because I don't want an actor for a husband,” because I'd already done that.' She had married Grant Withers in 1930 and divorced him the following year.

Although he had Merle Oberon and Loretta Young helping to guide his career, what Niven really needed was an unqualified success – something that turned him into a star. But a star part for an Englishman who had plenty of charm and wit and an authentic British stiff upper lip was rare in Hollywood. And then one came along, thanks to his friend Edmund Goulding who cast him opposite Errol Flynn in
The Dawn Patrol
.

This was a remake of a 1930 World War I drama about the Royal Flying Corps. Rare for an American movie, this had an almost entirely British cast – Flynn was Australian, but his English accent made him a Hollywood Brit. He took top honours as Captain Courtney, a member of a daring squad of British pilots flying in inadequate aeroplanes in an effort to beat off the German aces and their more superior aircraft.

Niven played Lieutenant Scott, a derring-do or die pilot who shares danger in equal measures with Courtney. It was a perfect role for Niven, and he gave the best performance of his career up till then.
Film Weekly
noted David Niven's ‘clever changes of mood, from wild gaiety to agonised worry prove him to be a deeply sensitive, natural actor'.

The critic of
Picturegoer
wrote, ‘Acting honours are fairly divided, but I would give pride of place to David Niven. It is a finely balanced, sincere performance.'

Variety
observed that the film ‘sparkles because of vigorous performances of the entire cast', and added, ‘David Niven makes the character of Flynn's great friend stand out.'

The Dawn Patrol
was filmed in early 1938, and gave the Niven-Flynn friendship a final hurrah. ‘It was wonderful to have such a good part in a
good film and to work with Flynn on pretty much equal terms,' David told me, ‘but I'd learned by then that while it was good to have a good role in a good Flynn film, it wasn't so good to be in Flynn's company after hours. I'd moved on, I suppose, from what we had before.'

Many people, including Merle Oberon and Loretta Young, were urging him to distance himself from Flynn. ‘I told David he needed to be seen to be taking his career seriously if he wanted others to take him seriously,' Young told me. ‘All that in-like-Flynn stuff wasn't good for David. When I think back now on how I used to sit him down and give him pep talks makes me smile. He was often like a naughty schoolboy and needed to be put right. Flynn was good for his career at that time but not good for him personally, especially considering the trouble Flynn got into later.' Loretta was referring to the case of statutory rape that was brought against Flynn in 1942.

But there was more to the breakdown of Niven's friendship with Flynn than a gradual breaking away from Flynn-induced antics. There was a very sudden and permanent rift between them. As Laurence Olivier put it to me, ‘Flynn goosed Niven, and Niven didn't take kindly to that at all.'

Ava Gardner also once referred to an episode Niven had told her about when Flynn ‘goosed' him. So I asked David about the ‘goosing' incident when I interviewed him in 1979. He said,

Flynn would get very drunk, and even though I could put away a fair bit, I didn't get smashed the way Flynn did. We had finished making
The Dawn Patrol
and we were celebrating our success with a couple of girls, and after we had sent the girls home, Flynn…well, he grabbed me…where a man doesn't expect another man to be grabbed. That's the sort of thing school boys might do, and I felt that it was time he really grew up, and I told him so, and he said, ‘Oh come on, sport, you and I, we're pals, and there's nothing wrong in a couple of pals having a little fun together.' And then he tried to grab me again. I had no idea where this came from. I told him he should grow up and that I was heading home, and he got rather nasty and was almost spitting with rage. He yelled, ‘I think you're the one who should grow up, Niven. This is Hollywood. People here are phoneys. They fuck anything that moves. What makes you so fucking different?' And I said, ‘Being loyal to my friends. You should try it.' And after that I never wanted to see him again.

He tried calling me, and he even wrote me a letter saying how sorry he was. I came to realise that most of the people who called themselves his friends were hangers on. I felt very sorry for him, and I was sorry our
friendship ended the way it did. I'm still angry about what happened, and I'm sad too. I had the best times with Flynn, and I had the worst. What did Dickens say? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and that's what I had with Flynn.

Over the years Niven's path rarely crossed with Flynn's. David did all he could to put distance between them, especially when Flynn became embroiled in a series of public scandals. I asked David in 1975 if he could remember the last time he saw Flynn. He said it was many years later, when Flynn was about 50 and looked more like 70. He said that it was a ‘joyful reunion' during which Flynn apologised for not ever contacting him after Niven's first wife, Primmie, died in a tragic accident.