Remembering David Niven, on and off the screen (original) (raw)

David Niven and Deborah Kerr in Bonjour Tristesse.

All the great movie stars have a simple, recognizable quality.

For Fred Astaire, it was elegance. For Humphrey Bogart, independence. For John Wayne, machismo.

And for David Niven it was — unflappability.

That’s not as marketable an image as sex, or rebellion or bravery — perhaps one of the reasons that, over a 50-year-career, Niven was never as big a star as some of his colleagues.

Yet to look again at the man is to be struck by his almost constant apparent calm — an eye-of-the-storm elegance present even when surrounded by low farce, high crimes or general madness.

And you can see that on-screen during a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, starting tomorrow. The classics are here — “Separate Tables,” his Oscar winner, “Around the World in 80 Days,” his biggest hit. But there are also a few rarer finds, like “Before Winter Comes,” with Niven as the head of a refugee camp.

Charles Silver, a curator in the museum’s film department, hopes it gives audiences a better look at the actor.

“The book on David Niven is that he was this great light comedian,” he says. “I think he was a lot more than that. Not many people could do the things he did better than he did.”

And one of those things Niven did faultlessly on-screen was to simply be. It was an amused, lighthearted grace he seemed to embody offscreen, too — even though his own life was sometimes far from graceful or light or amusing.

A very military man

James David Graham Niven was born in London in 1910; five years later his father died in the Gallipoli campaign of World War I. Still, it was assumed Niven would have a military career, too. (His mother’s father and grandfather had been Army officers.)

It didn’t quite work out that way.

The prankish boy got himself thrown out of one school and only just got into Sandhurst. After receiving his commission he was sent to Malta, where his insolence won him few friends. Asked once, after a long briefing, if he had any questions, he raised his hand — and inquired whether the major general knew when the next train was, as he had a date. He was put under house arrest for insubordination.

What follows next is a little vague — the events supposedly involve a sympathetic military policeman and a bottle of scotch — but very soon the 23-year-old Niven was on a boat, without the foggiest idea of what would come next.

“He found his way to America,” says his son Jamie Niven, vice chairman of Sotheby’s. “He was a waiter, he was a wine steward, he was a deckhand. He worked for a while on a charter boat out in California that the film people used to rent. One of them was Merle Oberon, and they got together. They became quite an item, actually, and she encouraged him to become an extra. That was the beginning.”

Niven was, at first, a nameless bit of human scenery — “Anglo Saxon Type #2008” according to his Central Casting listing. But Clark Gable, one of his old fishing-boat customers, took an interest. Errol Flynn became a chum (and eventually a roommate), if an undependable one. (“The great thing about Errol,” Niven later wrote, “was you always knew exactly where you stood with him, because he always let you down.”)

And, eventually, Niven got a contract.

He got a decent part in “The Prisoner of Zenda” and a flashier one in “The Dawn Patrol.” Less satisfying was the unsympathetic Edgar in “Wuthering Heights” — particularly when, trying desperately to cry on camera, Niven only unplugged a runny nose all over co-star Oberon — but it was a big film, and set him up for stardom. Movies like “Raffles” and “Bachelor Mother” clinched the deal.

“There were two great light comedians,” says Jamie Niven. “One was Cary Grant, and two was my dad. And he used to say, ‘Thank God for Cary Grant, because he can’t do all the roles people write for him, so I get to do the rest.’ ”

Except, just as Niven’s career was picking up in the fall of 1939, Germany rolled into Poland, and Great Britain declared war. And David Niven — that lightweight playboy — left Hollywood and quietly re-enlisted in the British Army. They asked him to run some training courses, perhaps make a film. He asked to be assigned to the Commandos.

The Hollywood movie star spent most of the war on grueling active service, at Dunkirk, at Normandy and at the Battle of the Bulge; by the end of it, he was a lieutenant colonel. On this subject, though, the great storyteller fell silent; he rarely spoke about the war and never about what he did. “Those guys never do,” his son says.

Grace under pressure

If the war had been a sobering experience, Niven was soon to have another even more personal one.

In 1940, two weeks after meeting her, Niven married bubbly British debutante Primula Rollo; in 1946, they moved back to Hollywood with their two small sons. After dinner at Tyrone Power’s house, the Nivens eagerly signed on for a silly game of “Sardines,” a light’s-out version of hide-and-seek. Looking for a closet, “Primmie” opened a kitchen door, jumped inside — and fell down the cellar stairs.

She died of a fractured skull.

Privately, Niven fell into a rare, nearly suicidal grief. He treated his depression with liberal doses of alcohol and sex. He married again — too quickly, and not too well — to a former Miss Sweden, a union that would last, sometimes frostily, until his death.

But publicly, no one saw anything but Niven’s easy charm — except on those rare occasions when he deliberately let it slip on-screen.

Yes, he was perfect as the calm globetrotter in “Around the World in 80 Days,” dashing in “The Guns of Navarone.” Yet he showed another side of himself as the humbug in “Separate Tables,” the philanderer of “Bonjour Tristesse” — movies that focused on the quiet desperation behind a placid exterior, the cold cruelties that a careless life could create.

If he didn’t often get those acting chances, it may be because “Hollywood didn’t take actors like Niven or Cary Grant that seriously,” says Silver. “People like Paul Muni,who put on heavy makeup and took on these earth-shattering roles, were treated with much more respect.”

Or, his son gently suggests, it may be because David Niven didn’t take himself that seriously.

“He did some really crappy movies,” Jamie Niven admits. “But he had his beautiful house in the South of France and a home in Switzerland. . . . What was most important to him was where the picture was being shot, and when and with whom. He wasn’t interested in going off to Africa for three months, or working with people who weren’t congenial.”

So, as he entered middle age, Niven coasted. Certainly he had earned the right. And occasionally there were surprises, like his happy pairing with Marlon Brando in “Bedtime Story.” (“My father was surprised, too, because he said, ‘Marlon’s never done comedy — except for ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.’ ”)

And there were small pleasures, like his role in “The Pink Panther,” a nod to the gentleman crooks he’d played 30 years before. The memorable live-TV moment of seeing him “streaked” at the Oscars — and recovering with a quip about the interloper’s “shortcomings.” And his best-selling memoirs, “The Moon’s a Balloon” and “Bring on the Empty Horses.”

Niven was enjoying his late-in-life career as a popular raconteur when he came home from a TV appearance to find messages from shocked friends wondering why he’d gone on drunk. A doctor finally provided the far more devastating explanation: Niven’s oddly slurred speech was actually an early symptom of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“He was very stiff-upper-lip about it all,” his son David Jr., a film producer, told the Daily Mail last year. “He told me, ‘Maybe this is God’s way of saying you have told enough stories over the years, and it’s someone else’s turn to be the life and soul of the party.’ ”

Goodbye to all that

Although Niven tried to continue working, his last film, 1983’s “Curse of the Pink Panther,” had to be dubbed by an impersonator; Hollywood’s favorite storyteller could no longer speak. The actor died that same year, at 73.

The largest arrangement at the funeral came from the porters at Heathrow Airport, who called Niven the kindest celebrity they’d ever met, a genuine gentleman who made every man “feel like a king.”

“The next time I went through Heathrow I found the shop steward and gave him two hundred pounds and told him to take everyone out that night for a drink on Dad,” Jamie Niven says. “I don’t think too many bags got on the right flights the next morning!”

At the funeral service, “Rumpole” author and longtime friend John Mortimer read the eulogy; he declared that Niven’s acting never “quite achieved the brilliance or the polish of his dinner-party conversations.” And that seems a fair judgment. For, despite all his charm, what did Niven have to show for it? Supporting parts in a few great films, leads in fewer good ones and make-work jobs in many more mediocre projects.

Only that. Only that and two successful and still-devoted sons. And an enormous circle of friends. And years of stoic and heroic service to his country. And a richer and more adventurous and more finely shaped life than any role he could have played onscreen — even if he’d ever really cared to.

IF YOU GO

“David Niven: A Centenary Tribute” runs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, tomorrow through April 23. For more information, visit

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