Darker reality behind the bonhomie

And so it seemed to him an odd suggestion when at the time of Niven’s death in Château-d’Œx, Switzerland, on July 29, 1983 he was asked by his publisher to write the first biography of the English actor born on March 1, 1910 in London’s prestigious Belgravia district, and winner of the 1959  Academy Award for Best Actor in the 1958 film “Separate Tables”.  

Morley had written about gifted persons in “A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noël Coward” in 1969, “Oscar Wilde” in 1976, “Gladys Cooper” (his grandmother) in 1979 and “The Hollywood Raj” in 1983. While considering this latest opportunity he contacted David Niven Junior, the actor’s elder son, and received an enthusiastic go-ahead. 

Niven Junior’s nod of approval included one factor without which Morley would not have proceeded – the son agreed to talk to the biographer without asking to see the manuscript before publication. Also importantly, he passed on an invaluable list of phone numbers of some of his father’s oldest friends. And he advised Morley that if he really wanted to know about Niven’s life, it wasn’t in the two autobiographies – “They’re all about other people.” 

Subsequently, Niven’s widow Hjordis, his sole surviving sister Grizel and his younger son Jamie also agreed to talk without conditions. Morley ultimately spoke to 150 people, with only one refusal to reminisce – Rex Harrison. Published in 1985, the book is still in print.  

Morley had something else going for him – he had actually known Niven. The future author and the actor first met in Hollywood shortly after World War Two when the former was a child living with his grandmother, English actress Gladys Cooper, who would work with Niven, Cary Grant and Loretta Young in “The Bishop’s Wife” (1947) and “Separate Tables”.  

Morley was born in 1941. “When we arrived in Hollywood”, he recounts, “Niven had just lost his first wife in a horrendous fall down a flight of cellar stairs, and their two sons would sometimes come over to play in the house that Gladys owned just a few doors away from theirs in Pacific Palisades.” The fall fractured Primula “Primmie” Susan Rollo’s skull. It was 1946 and she was just 28 years old. Sheridan and David Junior were both about five years. 

Ten years later the teenage Morley met Niven again with Morley’s father, actor Robert Morley, on the set of “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1956). And 20 years on, when Morley was writing his Noël Coward biography, he used to meet Niven with Coward in Switzerland, the two older men having chalets not far apart between Montreaux and Gstaad.  

Morley makes plain that he wanted to write a dispassionate biography of Niven, and not correct the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in “The Moon’s a Balloon” and “Bring on the Empty Horses”, which Niven penned more for entertainment rather than telling the truth of his life. Niven hadn’t wanted to write something depressing or just plain unfunny, Morley judges, and would modify some of his many anecdotes so as to offer a better punchline. 

While the critic Auberon Waugh asserted that “They read like some joker in a saloon bar who has told the same stories so often before to the same audience that they have been improved beyond any resemblance to whatever truth they originally contained”, Morley’s own choice of title, “The Other Side of the Moon”, doesn’t necessarily hint at a bad side. 

Rather, he concedes that he “had long been intrigued by the great difference between the Niven of the films and autobiographies – the cheerfully grinning but stiff-upped-lipped storyteller – and the occasional glimpses I’d had of a much darker, more complex and intriguing figure behind the clenched mask of the grin and tonic man”. But rarely unpleasant. 

The book is more about quirks, and one of Niven’s was to say he had been born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, when in fact he spent only a short part of his childhood there. He was the last of four children to William Edward Graham Niven, described on the birth certificate as a “landed proprietor”, and Henrietta Julia Niven. William was killed in the Great War, resulting in the wealthy family being often on the move and, in Niven’s eyes, a steep social decline. 

At Heatherdown prep school, in Ascot,  the pupils had to cultivate their own little plot, and Niven was expelled after stealing a prize marrow to adorn his. The “naughty schoolboy” often got into scrapes, and at Stowe School he was caught cheating in an exam and ejected again. At age 14 he was undergoing a different education courtesy Nessie, a Soho prostitute. 

Deciding to join the Army, in another mistep he listed the two regiments he would like to join, then put as his third choice “Anything but the Highland Light Infantry”. Such levity was not admired and he was promptly despatched into the Highland Light Infantry as a junior officer. The battalion was stationed In Malta, and Niven endured two years of torpor. 

During his five years in the Army he performed sketches in the soldiers’ concerts but not particularly successfully, though this did not stop him deciding he wanted to be an actor, “or indeed amost anything so long as it was no longer a soldier”. So, as a sort of travelling adventurer, in 1933 he ventured to New York, first as a hopeless whisky salesman then helping run a pony-racing racket in Atlantic City until the local Mafia advised moving on.  

Broadway did not beckon, so Hollywood did, though with no thespian experience at all “and a patent inability to act”.  A sort of carefree but charming disaster zone, Niven at least developed good social and professional contacts, being seen as a cheery young expatriate party guest. Slowly he worked up from a film extra to his first speaking role, three words. By mid-1936, when he had been in Hollywood for almost two years, his speaking roles had grown to seven films but he had made almost no discernable professional impression at all.  

Finally a breakthrough of sorts came when director William Wyler and Niven’s lover, actress Merle Oberon, coaxed his first passable screen part out of him, in “Dodsworth” (1936). 

“The Prisoner of Zenda” starring Ronald Colman in 1937, and “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” starring Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert in 1938 saw him getting his career off the ground at last. But Morley is a fair critic and says “The Dawn Patrol” in 1938 with fellow carouser Errol Flynn was among Niven’s few triumphs among those 90-plus films, many sheer awful. 

World War Two ended Niven’s potential leading man status as he quickly returned to Britain to do his bit, albeit mostly desk-bound. He then made a difficult post-war return to a changed Hollywood where his debonair sort of Englishness had become passé. He continued to suffer humiliating loan-outs to other studios and accepted rubbish, to support his family.  

“The Moon Is Blue” (1953), ”Around the World in 80 Days” (1956), ”The Guns of Navarone” (1961), ”The Pink Panther” (1963) and ”Death on the Nile” (1978) were on the plus side. But Morley is realistic, seeing a man lurching from one bad film to another and lacking the distinction of such English contemporaries as James Mason, Rex Harrison and Cary Grant.  

In fact, in this telling, it’s almost difficult to believe that Niven made some sort of a presentable acting career at all, relying more on his stock-in-trade charisma than real talent. Well, that’s life, and here is one, nicely covered by Morley, despite those early reservations.