Ten o’clock on a grey, wintry morning and Mr David Niven marched up a deserted Champs-Elysées, some of the insolence of his erect Sandhurst carriage slightly curbed by a blinding hangover. Approaching Fouquet’s he halted and gave a military gesture of warning: at the corner of the Ave George V a yellow tractor painfully raised a loosely dangling head, twisted to one side, and, gaping like a nightmare of the MGM lion, it stooped and tore a mouthful out of the macadam. Alongside three men were shivering miserably over pneumatic drills. Mr Niven retreated in good order down the avenue to a quiet café where he gave considerable thought to finding the appropriate cure for having celebrated 30 years in films in one crowded weekend.
Mr Niven first appeared on the screen in 1934 as a Mexican horse bandit with a drooping moustache, who was brought to heel by Hopalong Cassidy. “They liked my military seat,” he reminisced. “Then I was asked to say ‘Good-bye my dear’ to some lady getting on a train, and I was such a smash in that that they hired me to say ‘Hello my dear’ to someone getting off a train.”
Already the image of the suave, cheerful Englishman, with buckets of pluck and a rheumy eye for the ladies, was beginning to emerge. It flickered a little more clearly when he was given a top hat and asked to exchange a few insinuating words with Jeanette MacDonald in 1935, burst into full flower in “ Raffles,” and gained a new smirking ripeness in “The Moon is Blue.” In “The Way Ahead” and many years later “Separate Tables” (for which he won an Oscar) it also got depth.
Mr Niven claims that he has had the best possible formation for the ideal Englishman: born in Scotland; Sandhurst; tried to build bridges in Canada; speared shark in the Caribbean; brief association with Jack and Peter’s, the bootlegging palace in New York; tried to hire himself out as a mercenary soldier in Batista’s Cuba until told to move on by the British Consul; has not lived in England for 20 years; and once shared a house in California with Errol Flynn called “Cirrhosis by the Sea.”
Niven is one of the blue bloods of the MGM stables which in the thirties produced an astonishing collection of durable stars. The stables are no more; nowadays it is rare for actors to be on contract to a studio, and Mr Niven — although doing very nicely in the sixties — regrets the break up of the old system.
“Imagine at that time my studio had under contract, among others — remember that, only among others — William Powell, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, Charles Laughton, Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck. There were second-echelon stars like Robert Young and Franchot Tone, and in the MGM school learning their trade, people like Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Liz Taylor. And of course there was that marvellous collection of character actors, Frank Morgan, Eric Blore — scores of them!”
“Do you think television is really responsible for the break-up of Hollywood?”
“To begin with, the studios are now hardly ever used for anything but television films. Most of those character actors have gone to television. The real problem is that there is no such thing as a cinema audience anymore, at least in the United States. It is a television audience, spectators who have already been brainwashed by television. The standards are so low. I am a tiny bit qualified to speak about this because I ran a television company with Charles Boyer and Dick Powell, and in less than five years we turned out 1,800 films. We were not consciously turning out crap. But there is such an enormous appetite for material and it has to be turned out so quickly that inevitably there is no time to get the finesse going. There is no such thing as a writers’ building in Hollywood studios any more. In the old days there would be flocks of writers in their own building sweating away on scripts and ideas. When they got a star like Clark Gable, immediately there would be a team of writers working out the next four great Gable vehicles. Today there is no continuity. They are mostly independent productions; when the film is made the team breaks up. Then, you see, that golden age of Hollywood was really a one-generation business, wasn’t it? Goldwyn, Warner, and those boys built it up and kept it going for a generation, but they had not the faintest interest in research. If they had spent a fraction of their enormous profits on research the big studios might still be operating. If you go to Hollywood even now they still have the same way of lighting a film; it still takes forever to set up a scene.”
“That old system did have its disadvantages though — the artificial method of building up a star who could collapse to nothing overnight for example?”
“You will find that it was only the ones who were built up as great sex goddesses who collapsed. Imagine you are told that you are the most beautiful woman in the world and all your future hangs on that, but every day you are getting 24 hours older. You can get very jumpy! But many of the actors had very steady careers and are still going strong. Generally on television.”
“You worked with Lubitsch in ‘Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife’?”
“Yes. He was a very funny little man. He would squat on a ladder like a frog, watching you go through a funny routine, and he’d laugh so much he’d fall off. Then he’d get up again and we’d go through the whole thing again with him still dying laughing — but giving a little advice here and there. By the tenth or twelfth take you realised that you were far from your original interpretation — you were playing pure Lubitsch.”
“You knew Hearst also?”
“Yes. A very strange man. He was terribly afraid of death. He was always building out at that ranch. It was his guarantee of continuity.”
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