David Niven (3 page)

‘Then why are you telling me?' I asked.

‘Because when I'm dead, and God knows how long Grizel will live for, no one will know, and somebody should.
You
should.'

‘Why me?'

‘Because, as I said, you're a friend, an author and a priest.' And then he added, ‘But not necessarily in that order.'

He had been convinced as a child that his mother and Tommy had done their best to get him out from under their feet. ‘I think I was rather badly behaved as a child,' he said. ‘I wasn't into anything criminal. But I did run riot, which is why Tommy and my mother sent me to boarding school. They thought it would instil some discipline in me. It didn't, you know.'

He told me that his time at a private prep school in Worthing was ‘one of the worst experiences of my life. The older boys and the masters there bullied the younger boys.' He talked of being whipped with wet towels by the older boys and being hung out of a window by a school master.

‘I was terrible in most subjects,' he said. ‘I was terribly bad at mathematics, and I was rebelling even though I was really scared.'

In 1979, during the ‘angry interview', David told me, ‘I had things done to me that were simply horrifying. Younger boys were often abused by boys who would do the most disgusting things. I mean, sexual things. I call them sadistic, not sexual. Sex is a pleasure. This wasn't pleasure. I felt that I would never forgive my mother and stepfather for sending me there.'

He got a terrible boil from bad food which became infected when the school matron cut it off with a pair of scissors and he ended up in hospital. His mother removed him from that school and placed him, in 1919, at Heatherdown, an expensive private school at Ascot, where, he said ‘all the snobs went. But it was a good school with kindly masters and good food. I was happy there. My mother must have been up to her ears in debt but I suspect Uncle Tommy handed over some money for not just my schooling but for all of us. Max was at Dartmouth, and Grizel and I were both at boarding schools.'

David revealed that his mother wasn't so poor after all when I had lunch with him and actress Lynne Frederick in London in 1980. During a rather morbid conversation about inheritance – Lynne had just become a millionairess following the death of her husband Peter Sellers – David rather carelessly said, ‘We were lucky because my mother had inherited quite a bit from my father and could afford to take care of us very well indeed.'

I told him, ‘But you always said your mother was poor and you were always going without.'

He looked sheepish and said, ‘Yes, I did say that. It's Flynn's fault.'

‘Errol Flynn?' I asked.

‘Yes! Him! One of the first things he said to me was, “Tell them a good sob story, sport. They'll love you the more for it.” So my sob story was that my mother struggled with money. But she had done really well from the inheritance my father left her.' I reminded him that William Niven had lost a lot of money through bad debts, to which he replied, ‘Oh, not all that much. There was plenty left for my mother, and there was also money from Uncle Tommy as well.'

In 1982 I remarked that it would have been natural for his real father, Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, to have paid for his schooling.

‘Yes, that's true,' was his response. ‘But I never wanted to acknowledge that. It was very hard to accept that the man I always called Uncle Tommy was my father and was the one who forked out for my education.'

His mother was able to afford to buy a house at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight where the family spent summer holidays and where David discovered a love of sailing. Sir Thomas rarely joined them, preferring to stay in London where he owned a large house in Chelsea.

As a child, David was an attention seeker – something I think never changed. ‘I was a clown at school,' David said. ‘I was addicted to playing pranks, and it got me into a lot of trouble.'

There was the time when he stole a huge marrow from the nearby girls' school in an attempt to win a prize in the annual Flower Show for the best kept garden which each boy had. He told me, ‘I didn't win but I did get the cane for stealing.'

‘How did you get found out?' I asked.

‘Probably because some snitch couldn't keep his mouth shut. You see, I didn't keep my pranks a secret. I did them to entertain the other boys. By then I'd discovered that by making the other boys laugh, I became popular, and I admit that I wanted to be liked. Well, don't we all? I was liked because I made them laugh. I think they laughed more when I got caught and caned. The pain seemed worth the admiration I received. I
think, to be truthful, that it was like an addiction. I still have it. I
must
be the centre of attention. I love making people laugh.

‘When I arrived [at Heatherdown], I thought all the other boys were frightful because they were such snobs. I think they all went on to Eton. I felt out of place but had this strange overwhelming need to please them, and the only way I could do that was to play pranks and make them laugh. I still want to please everyone.'

In 1982, in a brief moment of re-evaluation, he asked me, ‘Wouldn't you like to be best remembered as someone who made people laugh? Made them happy? Or for just doing your job reasonably competently?'

I answered, ‘There can't be anything more important than making people happy.'

‘Then it's all been worthwhile. If people laughed then, yes, it's been worthwhile.'

During one interview, he recalled one of his finer pranks.

When I turned 10 my voice broke. I was the envy of many boys who still had their soprano voices. Our headmaster was a wonderful man called Sammy Day. There was a group of boys I liked a lot, and they were being given a hard time by some other boys. So I told my friends to follow me to the nearest public phone box where I made a call to Sammy Day.

In my deepest voice I said that I was a local shopkeeper in a popular sweet shop and that some of the boys from his school had been pilfering. I was able to give a good description of each of the boys. My friends were listening and giggling.

I got carried away and started to give too much information. ‘I think I heard one of the boys call another Wainwright. And another went by the nickname of Monkey…yes, a boy with large ears…no, I didn't catch his real name but there was also a boy called Ginger…yes, he had ginger hair.'

I thought I'd done a wonderful job, and my friends all congratulated me on my fine impression of the sweetshop keeper. The next day I was summoned before Sammy Day who had five boys in his office – the five I had turned in. Sammy Day said to me, ‘Would these be the five boys you were telling me about?'

‘Five boys? Told you? Me, sir?'

‘Yes,
you
, sir.'

I knew immediately I'd not fooled him for a minute. He presented them with the sight of me being caned. Six thwacks but it turned out it was worth every thwack because these boys were so impressed by my
prank that they not only stopped giving my friends a hard time but they also bought me lots of chocolate and sweets.

Then came the fall from grace with some of the boys, Sammy Day and other masters. I had become quite a nuisance with my pranks, but the more I sensed irritation, the harder I tried.

His last and most audacious prank was to send a large chocolate box to a friend of his at a nearby school. Inside was a smaller box, and then an even smaller box until finally there was a matchbox with some dog's mess inside. His friend was ill with pneumonia so the school Matron opened the box, and David was promptly expelled. ‘I was only ten and a half and already an outcast.'

His mother and Sir Thomas were beside themselves with angst and worry over their wayward boy. Because of his interest in sailing, they thought they might have better luck with his discipline if he was in the Navy so they planned to get him into Dartmouth Naval College for which he would need to pass a number of exams. But first they sent him to a school in Southsea which dealt with difficult boys, run by an ex-Royal Naval officer who, David claimed, punished boys by locking them in a dark cellar full of rats, and whose wife was an alcoholic who never fed the boys enough. In a rebellious and neglected state of mind, David joined a local gang of boys who stole from shops.

After a month in Southsea, David was enrolled in an expensive private school run by a vicar in Buckinghamshire where David was much happier, but after two years of schooling, he failed his maths exam which was essential for entry into Dartmouth.

That year, 1923, Stowe School opened at Stowe House near Buckingham. The headmaster, John Fergusson Roxburgh, was to become the father figure David had long needed. He never considered Thomas Comyn-Platt to be a suitable father figure, and for many years he complained that ‘Uncle Tommy' didn't care for or about him, but it was Comyn-Platt who was able to get him enrolled, in September, at Stowe School which was a much sought after house of education.

It was only in 1982 that David was able to say to me, ‘I never knew it at the time but Thomas took great care of me, in his own way. I suppose a man who had a son who wasn't legally his would try and do something for that boy. I could never call him father – he was always my stepfather – and I always called him Uncle Tommy. It was a farce. When it sunk in that he was actually my father, I think I came to resent and dislike him even more because I felt lost and confused, and I dearly needed someone to be a real father to me. My “real” father had been taken from me in the war, and
now I had a stepfather who couldn't even admit that I was his. But I suppose he loved my mother very much and he tried to do what was best for her and for me, and for Grizel. For all of us, really.'

He said, ‘I was lucky because I found someone who was the next best thing to a father. He was John Fergusson Roxburgh, the headmaster at Stowe School. He set me such a fine example that I tried hard to emulate throughout my life. He changed me for the better. Well, I couldn't have got much worse. I had been turning into an evil little bastard, but going to Stowe School turned my life around.'

He was also influenced by Major Richard Haworth, the recipient of a Distinguished Service Order, who was master of the ‘house' in which David was placed – Chandos House. Major Haworth had been a senior instructor at Sandhurst military college and was, said David, ‘a gentleman who received respect through understanding and kindness, but was never less that firm.' He was David's second role model figure at Stowe.

In the five years that David spent at Stowe School, he turned from an ‘evil little bastard' into the young charming gentleman that became the hallmark of his screen persona. I asked him how this amazing feat was accomplished. He said,

John Roxburgh was a young man, only 35. He wasn't like the old masters who believed that discipline could only be administered by use of the cane. He was incredibly tolerant and understanding, and he would actually listen to any boy who had a problem or a grievance.

I went to him soon after I started there because I'd decided that I was going to begin as I meant to go on, causing problems and trying to make myself stand out from the crowd and be liked. So I went to him and said, ‘Now see hear, Mr Roxburgh. The food here is disgusting. Not fit for animals. Who's doing the cooking? Chimpanzees? Just look at this boil I've got?' And I showed him what looked like a boil on my neck, modelled rather well, I thought, on the one I had at Worthing, only this one was made out of a red chewy sweet I'd sucked on for a while, moulded into shape and then stuck on my neck.

He looked at it very gravely, went ‘Tut! Tut!' and said, ‘This won't do at all.'

I said, ‘I know how to get rid of it. Give me a pair of scissors, please.'

He said, ‘But surely you're not going to cut it off. That could give you a terrible infection and you'd become gravely ill.'

I said, ‘It's no problem. I have a special antibody in my blood which fights infections.' I was going to snip it off and then baffle him over the next week as I remained perfectly healthy.

He said, ‘I have a better idea,' and he reached slowly and carefully out towards my fake boil, and as though he were suddenly grabbing a poisonous spider he whipped the boil off my neck and said, ‘Look at that. Not a mark has been left.' And then he ran the boil under his nose, sniffed a bit and said, ‘Strawberry. Nice try, Niven. Goodbye.'

I was more annoyed that he'd bested me than anything, and I went out and slammed the door and stood there a moment or two, and then I heard him laughing like a drain. And I knew that he was a good sort after all, and best of all, I'd made him laugh. He was an actual human being, and I made up my mind to be like him and not cause him any more trouble. And that's how I stopped being such a poisonous little bastard!

Because of his love of chocolates, David put on a lot of weight and became quite fat, earning him the nickname Podger. His weight problem subsided as he went through puberty, and by the time he was 14, he was fit and strong and playing rugby. He was also drinking, but not heavily. He told me, ‘I only got drunk once as a young man. I'd just turned 14 and polished off half a bottle of brandy. I don't know how I got there but I was found face down under a rhododendron bush. I was so ill that I quickly learned to hold my drink like a gentleman.'

For the rest of his life, like many actors, David drank but, unlike many drinking actors, never got drunk – well, hardly ever.

—

D
uring the school holidays, David, then 14, returned to his family who had moved to a large house at 110 Sloane Street in Chelsea, London. Joyce, who was then 24, was living at home, and Max had returned from a stint in the Navy and then the Army before resigning his commission. Sixteen-year-old Grizel also returned for the school holidays. ‘It was a packed house,' David told me. ‘There were a couple of maids, and my whole family, and there was no room for me. So Uncle Tommy sent me away every night to sleep in a boarding house in St James's Place. It was a dreadful hole with an iron bed and a floor with no carpet.