David Niven (25 page)

I didn't see him over the weekend as I was with friends, but on the Monday he took me to dinner, and we had dinner again on the Tuesday and Wednesday and
every
day.

I went to the studio each day and I met his two sons. I thought they were sweet boys, but it wasn't in my mind that I would ever become their mother. But I was already telling myself that I would marry David if he wanted me.

I think it was the next weekend when I really knew that I loved him. He had some friends in the country who we went to stay with. The two of us sat up very late after his friends had gone to bed, and he said, ‘I have to go back to Hollywood in a few more days,' like he was saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I have to get my suit cleaned tomorrow.'

I felt suddenly afraid that I would never see him again, and then he said, ‘I don't want to leave you behind. Will you marry me?' It was all very sudden, but I already knew that I didn't need time to think about it, and I said that of course I would.

It
was
sudden. Too sudden. David wasn't ready to get married again, and he never was fully able to explain why he married in haste. He tried to once, in 1980, saying, ‘I suppose I saw that here was a very beautiful woman who I found exciting and who I was quite besotted with – and the best thing of all, she wasn't an actress. But she looked like she could have been one. It was, as is often, a case of sexual attraction first, and then there was the very important factor essential to a successful relationship with me – I made her laugh.

‘But I don't know if I was really in love with her. I did come to love her very much before the bad times came along. But I didn't give it enough time before marrying her. If I had, I don't think we would have married.' After a thoughtful pause, he added, ‘I
had
to get married. I needed someone in my life. I was used to having someone special. And my sons needed someone to be a mother to them.' And that was the best reason he could think of for getting married.

Just how long it was between them meeting and getting married, neither of them could say for sure. Hjördis said, ‘It didn't seem like much more than a week. But we were in a romantic whirlwind.'

While romancing Hjördis, David still had a film to complete, and he did, with a great feeling of relief and a surety that the film would be so bad that it would bring his career to a tragic conclusion. ‘I didn't see how it could be anything but a disaster,' he told me. ‘Most of it was filmed on a sound stage at Shepperton Studios. It looked so
fake
, all those scenes set in the cardboard mountains. We looked far too warm. It was a Technicolor fantasy. It should have been a wild historic epic with wind and rain knocking us off real highland mountains.'

The film cost almost a million pounds, an extravagant amount for a
British film of the time, and while it attracted audiences, it couldn't recoup its cost. The critics tore into it. ‘The picture is not lacking in moments of unconscious levity,' wrote the
New Yorker
, ‘what with David Niven, as Prince Charlie, rallying his hardy Highlanders to his standard in a voice barely large enough to summon a waiter.'

‘David Niven disappoints,' said
The Star
, while the
Sunday Graphic
noted that Niven looked, ‘as much at home among the Highlanders as a goldfish in a haggis.'

The Times
didn't blame Niven for the disaster. ‘Mr David Niven has much of the fugitive charm that goes with the part, but the film refuses him the material he needs and only occasionally does his performance blaze up in flame and spirit – the heather is seldom alight and, when it is, the Technicolor fires are crude.'

Today the film is looked upon as a joke, and even in 1978 Niven didn't thank me for reminding him of it. But, as I said to him, ‘Surely all actors have to accept that there are going to be disasters as well as the successes,' to which he replied, ‘Yes, but the film wasn't just a disaster, it was a humiliation.'

The humiliation was put on hold while David and Hjördis got married at South Kensington register office on Wednesday 14 January 1948. Michael Trubshawe – David's best man for the second time – and Hjördis did not hit it off. Trubshawe gave me his version of events.

I'm afraid Hjördis and I didn't get on from the start. We met at a party that was given by David's society friend, Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie. I took one look at her and realised she already looked like a Hollywood star and I thought that she was going to marry him just so she could get into movies, so just about the first thing I said to her was, ‘Look, if you think that marrying David is a passport to become a Hollywood star, then you're in for a bitter disappointment.' I said that because I knew that David would never want to be married to an actress, and he would stop her before she got started. So we didn't hit it off which upset David, I'm afraid. But he wasn't sure that he should marry her anyway.

That night he told me that he thought everything was happening far too quickly and he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to go through with it. He said, ‘It's going to be a disaster, old bean. But what can I do?'

I told him to call the wedding off before it was too late.

He said, ‘I can't do that. It's all arranged, and my sons think they are going to have a new mother. How can I deprive them of that?' He said, ‘No, I will just have to see it through and we'll see what happens.'

So as far as I was concerned, the marriage was doomed from the start.

I asked Trubshawe to try to tell me exactly what he didn't like about Hjördis, and when he said he just thought she was a gold-digger, I pressed him to comment on her personality, and he said, ‘Well, for God's sake, she was a
Swede
. And she wasn't Primmie.' I think that summed up much about how people felt about her.

I didn't tell Hjördis what Trubshawe had told me but simply asked her what she had thought of David's oldest friend. She said, ‘I was very upset by Michael Trubshawe. He was David's best
man…again
. He thought I was just a gold-digger and that I wanted to use David to become a star in Hollywood. I had never ever thought about becoming a movie star.'

Although Trubshawe is featured prominently in
The Moon's a Balloon
and was undoubtedly one of David's dearest and oldest friends, Trubshawe accused David of avoiding him in later years. He said Niven seemed embarrassed by his presence, especially when Trubshawe carved out a modest career for himself as an actor and began turning up in bit parts in some of David's films. Trubshawe, a very genial and generally inoffensive chap who I liked immensely, was bitter about the way Niven cold-shouldered him and believed it was because he reminded David too much of the old days and of Primmie. ‘I think it was too painful for him to remember all that, and I only reminded him of it all.'

He was wrong. David told me, ‘I thought the world of dear old Trubshawe but he let me down when he made himself unpopular with Hjördis. Their friendship was always strained from the day before the wedding. I had to live with Hjördis, not with Trubshawe.'

I think
that
is the reason Niven later avoided Trubshawe. Hjördis thought so too and regretted that she came between two good friends. She said, ‘I wanted to be a friend to Trubshawe. I wanted to be friends to
all
of David's friends. But many of them seemed to take an instant dislike to me. I couldn't understand it. I was a
good
person back then. I was faithful to David, I wasn't getting drunk. I did drink a little too much by the time I met David. David drank a little too much. All of his friends drank a little too much. They didn't like me because I wasn't Primmie.'

David was aware that his friends had trouble accepting her. He told me, ‘The same thing happened to Sylvia when she married Doug Fairbanks. They had it in for her at the start because she wasn't Mary [Pickford]. I felt very protective of Hjördis. I knew she found it difficult to mix in Hollywood because Swedes have a certain disposition that makes them seem cool and distant, but she was really very warm and funny.'

Among Niven's friends who felt the marriage was a mistake was Peter Ustinov who said to me in 1984, ‘Oh, no doubt, David was on the rebound. He should have given himself time to get over Primmie's death.
Mind you, he
never
got over it. No woman would ever be able to compare with her, and that's what Hjördis had to contend with. She had the ghost of Primmie with her the whole time, and I think it wore her down.'

Ava Gardner hit the nail on the head with her theory why David married Hjördis: ‘The only reason he married her was because she was the one woman who
looked
like a movie star but
wasn't
one. He could only marry a very glamorous woman, but he couldn't marry an actress. That's why he never married Merle [Oberon] or Rita [Hayworth].'

Ustinov believed that Rita Hayworth wanted to marry David and that he married Hjördis to prevent all further attempts by any actress to become Mrs Niven. ‘Rita Hayworth wanted to be the next Mrs Niven. Rita was a great deal of fun and extremely beautiful – all that glorious red hair. David loved her, but not enough to want her for his wife. I don't know if he loved Hjördis, but when she became Mrs David Niven it made him safe from all the others who wanted to be his wife.'

One of the few of David's friends who did approve of Hjördis–or rather, didn't dislike her – was Laurence Olivier who told me, ‘It was easy to see why David was attracted to her. She was very funny, very beautiful, and he had two small sons to look after. He thought she would take care of the boys and be a very glamorous wife in the process. I'm afraid it didn't quite work out that way, and I was very sorry it didn't.'

Goldwyn allowed David to take a month's holiday after
Bonnie Prince Charlie
wrapped and expected him back in Hollywood on 2 February to start work immediately on another film, but Niven was exhausted and had come down with the flu. He was also stressed by demands from the Inland Revenue demanding back taxes. He demanded extra time off for a honeymoon.

Goldwyn wasn't sympathetic and ordered him back to Hollywood so just three days after the wedding, David took his two sons, Pinkie and his bride back to California. They had barely settled into the Pink House when David went to work on
Enchantment
, a Goldwyn production which gave David top billing as General Sir Roland Dane, an elderly Englishman who recounts his younger days to one of his young relations, played by his one-time girlfriend Evelyn Keyes.

‘It wasn't a difficult part,' David told me. ‘I just played the same part I'd played before only this time for a couple of scenes I had to make-up to look old. I think I looked like Mark Twain with a fake white moustache bigger than my own, and a grey-white wig which made my head look large at the top.'

Teresa Wright co-starred as an orphan girl the young Roland falls in love with. Jayne Meadows played Niven's bitter and bitchy sister. It wasn't
a bad film and even had some kind words from the critics. ‘The little family anecdotes are played with a disarming sincerity and skill by Teresa Wright, David Niven and Evelyn Keyes with some welcome acid by Jane Meadows,' said the
Daily Mail
.

‘Little addicted though I am to these four-in-hand romances,' wrote the
Sunday Times
film critic, ‘I must give the film credit for sensitive direction and playing capable of extracting emotion from situations that have become clichés of the screen.'

David was becoming more impatient with the way he felt Goldwyn was mishandling his career and underpaying him. He was also trying to cope with introducing his bride to a whole new life. Hjördis recalled,

When I got to Hollywood, many of the people I met disliked me straight away. I couldn't compete with Primmie so I tried not to. I withdrew quite a lot. I couldn't bear being disliked just for not being Primmie, and so I drank a little more. Then we had to live in the Pink House. It never felt like
my
home. I was glad that Primmie never actually lived in the house because if she had I wouldn't have been able to live in it at all. I found all her towels with her initials on it and I had them all put into the guest house. When David's friends found out, they behaved as if I had committed a crime, but David understood. He felt he needed to stop being reminded of Primmie every day.

It wasn't a happy start to a marriage because David had really been in too much of a hurry, and there was just so much strain on me – on the both of us – but on me because
I
shouldn't have become his wife. I sulked and sulked and everything built up until I needed to quarrel with him to just let it out. David hated quarrels and he went into the cellar and read books and wrote just to escape from me. It was very hard for him. It wasn't his fault. It wasn't mine. It was very bad timing. Maybe another year and we could have got married and been happier.

The most immediate challenge for her was trying to become a part of the two boys' lives. She said, ‘I loved the boys, and we laughed and played games, but I wasn't their mother. I was very stupid because I didn't think about what it would mean to marry a man with two sons. I wanted to have children of my own more than anything.'

Some of David's friends in Hollywood made Hjördis welcome. She recalled,

I did have some good friends but they were the Swedes in Hollywood – Greta Garbo and Anita Ekberg. They understood me. People around
the world are not all the same. Americans are wonderful people, very outgoing. Swedes are more introvert.

Fred and Phyllis Astaire were very nice to me. So was Noël Coward. He used to say to me, ‘My dear, you are a delicious Swede. Not everybody enjoys Swede with their steak. They prefer peas and carrots if they are English and ketchup if they are Americans.' That made me laugh. Noël always made me laugh.