David Niven (39 page)

‘Is it a healing?' he asked.

‘It might be,' I said. ‘Just stay sitting in your chair.'

‘Oh, thank you. You know, I wasn't looking forward to getting on my knees. Awfully hard to get down, and when I'm down, damn near impossible to get up again.'

I stood behind his chair, lay my hands upon his head, and began to pray that he would find the strength to overcome his fears and that, in time, he might have power over his own life, to be able to give it up when he was ready to do so, as Jesus Christ gave up his life on the cross, and as I said that, David lifted one hand and placed it on top of my hands.

When it was over, he sat quietly for several minutes, and then said, ‘That was one of the most beautiful moments of my life, and I shall never forget it.'

When it was time for me to leave, we shook hands and he said, ‘I doubt we shall meet again, unless you can come to Switzerland.' I said I would
try to come over. ‘Write to me,' he said, ‘and I'll drop a line to you while I can still write.'

A month later, in August 1982, I read in the newspapers that David was seriously ill; the news had finally broken but it was inaccurate. Princess Grace, in an effort to protect him, had been quoted as saying he had suffered a mild stroke. The public still didn't know the truth about his disease. I had one tabloid newspaper call me asking for information and I told them I was unaware that David had suffered a stroke. Asked what I thought might be wrong with him, I said, ‘I expect he's sick and tired of being asked what's wrong with him.'

On 14 September Princess Grace died when her car left the road in Monte Carlo and plunged from the Grande Corniche. David desperately wanted to attend her funeral but was afraid that his emotions, now highly fragile, would cause a scene, and so he stayed away.

Another of his closest friends, Robert Coote, died in New York on 26 November. That month he wrote to me from Château d'Oex and told me about a wonderful Irish nurse, Katherine Matthewson, who was now taking care of him. He had met her while in a London hospital during the late autumn; she was an agency nurse and he decided to hire her. She returned with him to Switzerland and stayed with him to the very end. I think she may have actually been the greatest blessing in his life in his last months. Hjördis was incapable of looking after him. ‘The time when he needed me the most, I wasn't there for him,' she told me. ‘When David was ill I had a blackout. It may have been a fit. I fell and broke my leg.'

Peter Ustinov had nothing but contempt for Hjördis. ‘I think she hated him. Some people aren't capable of hatred. She was.'

I said, ‘That doesn't mean she hated him.'

‘She gave a good impression of hatred. She said that here was a man who couldn't even make himself understood any more. That's such a cruel thing to say.'

It was. And she knew it. ‘I said some terrible things,' she told me. ‘I don't expect to be forgiven for any of them. I was cruel to David. But that wasn't who I really was. I had become something else.'

In December 1982 Hjördis issued a short press release to announce that David was suffering ‘a muscular disorder, but it is not cancer or a heart attack as many people have supposed'.

David wrote one last time to me to say he had written a letter to Hjördis because he had come to the decision he wanted a divorce and was taking the girls away with him. He said that in his letter he had told her how much he loved her and would to the day he died. But he never gave her the letter because he realised it was a folly to get a divorce now and would
accomplish nothing. ‘Besides,' he said, ‘I would like to be remembered as one Hollywood actor who never got divorced.' That meant a lot to him; he never wanted to be a divorcee.

When I asked Hjördis if she had known of the letter, she said, ‘I had no idea. Oh my God!' She was shocked and ashamed.

There was something else he said in his letter to me. ‘You won't believe this, but I kneel every night to say my prayers. I pray with Katherine who helps me to kneel and then helps me to get up. She has a beautiful faith. You would like her.'

He continued to work on his novel, but he knew he was failing both because of a lack of inspiration and his growing inability to hold a pen. He managed to complete 50,000 words. He no longer wrote his own letters but dictated them.

A campaign began among David's friends to get him a knighthood. At the time, very few actors were knighted, and those that were knighted were usually the giants of British theatre. Niven himself had little regard for honours in the acting world. He once told me, ‘Of course Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson deserved them, but who else can match them?'

In the event, no knighthood was considered for David, perhaps because he was a tax exile. In more recent years that hasn't prevented other British actors from getting knighthoods, and today such honours seem to be handed out far less exclusively than they once were. I don't know if David Niven should have been knighted or if he would have even welcomed it.

He returned to London one more time in February 1983 for further treatment at the Wellington Hospital at St John's Wood. I was able to get in to see him simply by putting on an official badge that identified me as ‘Elder Michael Munn of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints', giving me church minister status that allowed me into any hospital at any time.

I found him in a private room under the name of David Snook. He didn't say very much – he was very ill and needed rest, so I just sat with him and talked about mundane things; he particularly enjoyed hearing about my three children, one of whom was named after Tony Curtis and another after Natalie Wood. ‘Do you think you'll name one after me, if you have another boy?' he asked.

‘I can't,' I said, ‘I have a nephew called David and my parents would never forgive me if there were two Davids in the family.'

He smiled and said, ‘Just don't name him after Errol. He'd never forgive you being stuck with a name like that.'

He asked me to tell him about some of the people we both knew and liked – Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Charlton Heston, George Raft,
Ava Gardner. He loved hearing gossip and he said, ‘You've got some good stories. I'll use them in my next memoir and say they happened to me.' I told him he was welcome to.

He wanted to know who my lovers had been, and while there wasn't much to tell him on that score, I was able to give him a tale or two that had him pointing to my Elder's badge and saying, ‘You weren't always such a saint, were you?' I took that as a compliment from David Niven.

Then I told him a favourite story of mine, known as
Footprints in the Sand
. Paraphrased, as I told it, a man walks along the beach with the Lord, and as he does so, he always sees two sets of footprints in the sand. But when life became difficult he could see only one set of footprints, and he asked the Lord, ‘Why, when you had told me that you would always walk with me, could I only see one set of footprints?' The Lord told him, ‘My precious child, I love you and would never leave you. During the times when you were suffering and were in desperation and you saw only one set of footprints, that, my son, was when I was carrying you.'

David listened. He said nothing but looked very peaceful and then fell asleep. That was my last memory of him.

He returned to Lo Scoglietto but was no longer able to go to his favourite public places to eat because he had difficulty swallowing. He swam with difficulty every day, and Katherine swam with him. ‘She was wonderful to him,' Hjördis told me. ‘He would have to wear a rubber ring, and she was with him the whole time in the water.'

As for her own contribution to his welfare, Hjördis admitted she made none. And her own behaviour towards him was, she said, ‘despicable'. She was fond of a doctor she had met at the Wellington Hospital, and he came to the Niven house in the summer. ‘He was there to help David,' she said, ‘but he was also there for me. I was selfish. I had a romance with the doctor, and my girls were there in the house, and I don't think they ever forgave me. I thought that his nurse could do everything for him.'

During the summer, I received one last and very brief letter from David who surprisingly wrote it by hand so it must have been a painful ordeal for him. He said that he had been blessed to have Katherine and that he was saying his prayers every night. He also said he had found a sense of peace and that he had also been sent a copy of the
Footprints in the Sand
story by a doctor friend of his. Hjördis told me that he kept it to the end of his life and read it almost every day. He also said that he had decided to take control of his life stating that he was not to be put on a life support machine at any time.

Among old friends who visited him was Richard Burton. When I was with Burton on the set of
1984
, which was the last time I saw Richard, he
told me that he had been to see David shortly before he died and was amazed at how David was able to make jokes about his condition. ‘He looked so terrible,' Rich said, ‘and his voice was very slurred and I had trouble understanding him. He suddenly said, “My dear Richard, I am not deaf so please kindly stop shouting at me.” I hadn't realised I was shouting.'

In July David was photographed and the picture, showing him looking very emaciated, appeared in the
Sun
newspaper. When he saw it he was distraught and believed he would have better privacy at Château d'Oex. He also felt that the clearer air up there would do him good. Hjördis remained at Lo Scoglietto and was later criticised for doing so, but in 1986 she told me, ‘David insisted that I stay at Lo Scoglietto so that I could have a rest from him. I think he also needed to be away from me.'

He had, she claimed, asked her to commit suicide with him. She said, ‘Before he left for the chalet, he said to me, “Let's jump hand in hand into the pool, go down three times but only come up twice.” I was shocked.'

Fiona, then 19, came home to attend Geneva University and was often at Château d'Oex, and so was Hjördis's nephew, Michael Winstrad; he was fond of his uncle but Hjördis seemed to resent him being there and told him he needed to return to Sweden where his mother was dying – a blatant lie, apparently. She was never able to give a rational explanation why she did that.

Meanwhile, Kristina was in Geneva and David Jnr and Jamie were both in the States. Niven's sons were later critical of Hjördis for failing to give their father the love and care he needed in the last weeks of his life, but she was equally critical of them, telling me, ‘He was their father and we all knew he was soon going to die. They should have dropped everything to be with him.' There was no love lost between Hjördis and her stepsons.

On 27 July, a Wednesday, Hjördis telephoned David and apparently berated him about no longer being a man and refusing to come to him when he asked her to. Hjördis was unable to recall that incident when I met her in 1986, although she conceded, ‘I may have been so drunk and so full of pills that I could have done or said anything. I am very sorry for my behaviour.' And I believe she was. She cried often throughout the interview, and I believe she was sincere about her behaviour which she admitted was ‘unforgivable'. She also admitted that she had taken a new lover, a painter called Andrew Vicari.

David still kept her photograph on his desk.

That night he had trouble getting to sleep and stayed up late talking to Katherine about Primmie. David Bolton came to see him in the morning and saw how desperately ill he looked so he sent for the local doctor. It was decided that David needed to be hospitalised and put on a respirator, but
Jamie and David Jnr, by telephone, confirmed that their father was not to be given any form of life support. David apparently made one concession to allow himself to be more comfortable; he wore an oxygen mask.

The next morning, Friday 29 July, David finally fell asleep around 3am. Katherine checked on him at 7am and when he gave her the thumbs up sign, she went downstairs to make coffee. Then she heard a noise from his bedroom and returned to find that he had taken off the oxygen mask. He smiled at her, held her hand, and passed away. He was 73.

Some years later I discussed with Sheridan Morley David's manner of dying. Sheridan said that from what he understood, it was as though David had simply decided the time had come, had removed his oxygen mask, and then quickly slipped away. ‘I don't think he was going to wait any longer and actually stopped living rather than choosing to die, if that makes sense.' I said that it made perfect sense to me. I think he'd given up his life. He'd made his own decision.

As soon as Roger Moore heard the news, he drove from his home in St Paul de Vence with his daughter Deborah to help with the funeral arrangements. Fiona was also there, as well as David Bolton and a friend from David's war days, Alistair Forbes. Fiona, Bolton and Katherine decided what suit David should wear; it was a dark green which was his favourite colour.

Hjördis arrived the next day, Saturday. Roger Moore only ever mentioned her once to me, when he was filming
A View to a Kill
. ‘When she arrived and saw me she said, “Are you here for the publicity?” so I quickly left and didn't stay for the funeral because I might have ended up killing her. I'm quite sure that if he had lived, he would have divorced her.' Moore regretted not being able to be at Niven's funeral.

David Jnr and Jamie arrived on Saturday night.

The funeral was set for Tuesday 2 August at 2.30pm at a small Anglican Church, St Peters, in the main street of Château d'Oex. Hjördis arrived drunk, hanging on the arm of Prince Rainier.

‘I hadn't wanted to go,' she told me. ‘I couldn't accept that David was dead. I couldn't accept that he had been so ill. When the news came I broke down. I know everybody hated me, and I suddenly found I couldn't face any of them – even my own daughters, and David's sons. Roger Moore despised me – he has never spoken to me again. I was agoraphobic and the very thought of going to the funeral terrified me. It's a crippling illness of the mind. Rainier was very sweet and also very strong, telling me I
must
go. He
made
me go, and if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't have been there.'