In David Niven’s opinion, Bonnie Prince Charlie was one of the worst films he ever made. To his distress, his moustache was shaved off and he was put into a blond wig – as was his co-star, the macho Jack Hawkins. “I asked Jack to tell me honestly if I looked like a prick. He said, ‘Yes, and so do I.’ And he did too. We all looked like pricks,” Niven told me.
There were compensations for a Hollywood star working at Shepperton studios in postwar Britain. He found time to have a fling with the then Duchess of Kent. He also became very friendly with Princess Margaret. According to his closest crony, Michael Trubshawe: “He told me he was having a marvellous time with Princess Margaret and then he told me something that she did to him which he enjoyed very much.”
“Like what?” I asked. “I can’t tell you. Not while the princess is alive.”
I never did find out, but David’s second wife, Hjördis, told me: “He and Princess Margaret were lovers. But you can’t print that.” I think it’s okay to print it now, so many years later.
Hjördis (pronounced Yerdiss) was another of the women he seduced while filming Bonnie Prince Charlie. The difference was that, within days, he asked her to marry him. It was something he frequently regretted.
The story of his second marriage is complex, baffling, emotional and tragic. Hjördis was 28 when they met. A stunningly beautiful woman, she was the Swedish supermodel of her day. Yet many people who knew the Nivens railed about her as though she were some kind of evil banshee. I have seldom come across any person connected with Hollywood who has been the victim of such bitter character assassination.
Still married to her after more than 30 years, Niven summed her up for me in 1980: “She isn’t good company, and she can’t do anything. What she can do is make herself look very good, and she can arrange flowers. But that’s all.”
That was comparatively mild. In the intervening years he had wished her dead, contemplated killing her and forced her into the humiliating adoption of his love child.
She readily admitted to me that she also behaved unbelievably badly. She became an alcoholic, took lovers and was beset by mental illness and a terrible secret she harboured from childhood.
So why did this most attractive and charming of men, who – as Hjördis once screamed at him in a row – targeted every actress, air hostess and waitress he met, stay married to her for the rest of his life?
In interviews I did with David as a film publicist who became his confidant – and with Hjördis after he died – I came to understand the reality behind his debonair film-star image.
They met at a dark time. Niven’s vivacious first wife, Primmie, had died in a freak accident, leaving him two young sons, and he had tried to blow his brains out in despair.
He told me he had to get remarried quickly. “I needed someone in my life. I was used to having someone special. And my sons needed someone to be a mother to them.”
His friend Peter Ustinov, the actor, believed he married Hjördis to avoid marriage with an actress. Ustinov said: “Rita Hayworth wanted to be the next Mrs Niven. Rita was a great deal of fun and extremely beautiful – all that glorious red hair. David loved her, but not enough to want her for his wife. I don’t know if he loved Hjördis, but when she became Mrs David Niven it made him safe from all the others who wanted to be his wife.”
Hjördis was initially a big hit when Niven took her back to America. Life magazine named her one of the 10 most beautiful women in Hollywood and film producers tried to lure her onto the screen. Niven was furious. “I wanted a wife, not another film star in the family,” he told me.
Hjördis said: “David Selznick wanted to give me a screen test. He said that I would look marvellous, and any woman would enjoy such flattery. So I thought that maybe I could give it a try. I had no other interest in my life. But David said that he should be my interest. And so should his boys.”
According to Hjördis, her new friend and fellow Swede Greta Garbo advised her: “Become an actress, make a few films and then, when you are bored with it, give it up. It’s your life: you must do what you want. If you don’t, you will always be just Mrs David Niven.”
Niven won. Discontented, Hjördis rapidly won a reputation for laziness – staying in bed long after her punctual husband went off to the studio – and for drinking too much. “I did drink a lot, but so did David,” she told me. “A woman is not allowed to drink like a man.”
Resentment built up: “I always felt second to him. I shouldn’t be anything more than his ‘wife’. I shouldn’t be an actress, and I shouldn’t drink as much as him, or more than him.
“I didn’t want him deciding what I could or couldn’t be. I felt like I was not in control of my own mind. I hated to be controlled. So, yes, I drank a little more.”
Niven had no intention of giving up other women. He once insisted to me that they were “essential”. Hjördis said he “was a man who needed sex all the time and he needed it from different women. He couldn’t be monogamous”.
“He was never faithful to me,” she said. “I’ve been accused of being the one who was unfaithful. Well, yes, later I was unfaithful, but that was because he was going with other women, and I thought: to hell with him; I can do that also. But again, in Hollywood, a man can play around, but awoman?”
Within months of the wedding he had an affair with Grace Kelly in New York. The actress Dawn Addams (another possible conquest) told me: “Infidelity seems to be an occupational hazard with many actors. With David it was almost a second career.”
Hjördis began to suffer from depression and panic attacks. Niven thought she was faking it. “I’d seen Vivien Leigh [the film star] suffer from mental illness, and I didn’t want to think that my own wife could be mentally ill as well,” he said.
Hjördis sourced her depression to having been sexually abused by a member of her family when she was a girl. The trauma affected the rest of her life. “I can’t bear to be controlled. I want to be in control of myself. My memories controlled me, alcohol controlled me and David controlled me.”
She tried to have children, but by the mid1950s – when Niven’s career got a huge boost from his role as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days – she had suffered a series of miscarriages and, finally, a hysterectomy.
“I don’t show my emotions,” she said. “That is the Swedish part of me, but losing my babies was shattering. It was for David too. He could show his emotions far more than I could. People thought I didn’t care, but I did. I felt like my babies had died and I was mourning for them, but because I didn’t show how I felt, people thought I was a bitch.”
They tried to fix their marriage with a holiday by going around the world slowly in 180 days. But he was mobbed by female fans wherever they went.
“I could tell they would all sleep with him if they had the chance,” said Hjördis. “Of course that made me jealous. I worried that he would meet someone much younger – he loved the younger girls – and then he would leave me. I couldn’t help my moods. I had depression and I drank to ease the dark feelings.”
She claimed he told her: “You’re such a cold fish at times, it’s no wonder I look to find love and warmth in other women . . . So you go right ahead and sleep with other men.”
She did so, falling in love with a doctor. “I’m drawn to doctors. Almost all my lovers have been doctors,” she said.
IN 1959, 40 years old and still very beautiful but looking thin and drawn, Hjördis walked out.
“David blamed me for having an affair and wrecking our marriage. There was a terrible argument. I think it was an argument we should have had years earlier. Things might have been better then. He said, ‘I’m sick of seeing you flirting with every man.’ I said that I didn’t flirt with every man. He accused me of flirting with my eyes, and I said, ‘How can I help the way my eyes look?’
“Oh, we were yelling and shouting. I felt it was good for us. He said, ‘You’re sleeping with your doctor.’ I said, ‘You’re sleeping with every actress you work with. Every air hostess. Every waitress.’ He stopped shouting then.”
Niven recalled: “I knew I had to save the marriage somehow, if not for my sake then for the boys. I don’t think they thanked me for saving the marriage. They didn’t like their stepmother too much.”
Somehow, while having a fling with “a beautiful English model”, he managed to persuade Hjördis that he missed her. She came back, only to find herself caught up in a humiliating subterfuge for the rest of her life: his secret love child.
At first things seemed better. They moved to Switzerland – to get away from both Hollywood and high taxes. While he w o r k e d o n T h e G u n s o f Navarone, the wartime epic, she found a chalet for them near Gstaad. When filming was over they had lunch nearly every day at the nearby Hotel Olden, frequented by friends including Princess Grace and Prince Rainier; Elizabeth Tay-lor and Richard Burton; and Peter Sellers.
Hjördis was drinking again and taking pills for depression. In Niven’s words, “she became ever more crazy”.
She confessed: “I was always drunk by lunchtime, and whenever we saw our friends coming in, I gave them loud greetings, which embarrassed David.”
Burton once told me: “She would be drunk every time, but David never complained. And she seemed to try it on with all the men. Even me, even when I was with Elizabeth. I told David he should leave her at home but he said it was good for her to get out.”
“People thought I was strange,” Hjördis remembered. “Well, I was strange, but it was due to the medication, the alcohol, the depression. I was afraid of going anywhere. So I took sedatives to calm me down.”
Niven told me early in our friendship: “I thought it would make Hjördis happy if we adopted a child. We talked to friends about the idea and they thought it would be marvellous. Hjördis said she’d love to adopt a Swedish girl, so we did. Her name was Kristina.”
For many years he maintained this pretence. But in a final confessional interview with me a year before he died, he at last revealed that Kristina was his own daughter. After his death, Hjördis confirmed this.
In 1960 he had had an affair in Switzerland with an 18-year-old girl who became pregnant. The baby was only a few weeks old when the Nivens adopted her. He told Hjördis the truth and made her promise never to tell anyone – not even Kristina herself.
“I felt so miserable when I learnt the truth,” Hjördis said. “Nobody knew what I was feeling. They all thought I was just a drunken bitch. I became a drunken bitch. I had to pretend that I was happy to adopt Kristina. But she was his child by another woman.
“But, you know, I can look back and realise that he was trying to do the right thing for everyone. He wanted to help the mother of our baby girl, and he wanted me to have a child to raise.”
She added: “I tried to cope with everything – all the secrets and the lies. The stress was incredible. I had a hard time dealing with it, and I drank more and more to try to cope, but it didn’t make the problem go away. It just turned me into a hopeless drunk again. I was an alcoholic.”
Hjördis came to love Kristina very much and did her best to give her “a normal life, as normal as is possible when you are David Niven’s daughter”.
It didn’t stop the philandering, which Hjördis was well aware of. “I got my revenge,” she said. “Jack Kennedy wanted a quickie, and I gave him a quickie.”
This happened, apparently, when the Nivens went to the White House for President Kennedy’s 46th birthday celebrations in May 1963, six months before he was shot.
Hjördis said: “He gave me a disease. Chlamydia. It taught me that revenge is not the solution. After that I just got worse. Drinking more; rejecting David. I felt like I was tumbling downward and didn’t know how to get back up.”
Princess Grace became most concerned about her and wanted to help. Niven recalled: “Grace said to me, ‘I’ll talk men with her. Just girl talk.’ I said, ‘Any kind of talk. Please, Grace, just do something’.”
Hjördis told me: “One of my best friends was Grace. I felt comfortable with her. We talked a lot about men. She was a very naughty girl, you know. She had a lot of affairs in Hollywood. She had an affair with David.”
Niven also agreed to another adoption. Hjördis said: “David asked me what would make me happy. I said I couldn’t just be happy. But I thought that adopting another girl would help. We found a beautiful little baby girl, just four months old and an orphan. We called her Fiona.
“I had really grown to love Kristina. It was hard at first because of the circumstances, but it wasn’t her fault and I really loved her, and I loved Fiona right from the start. I wasn’t a good mother. I had no real idea what a mother does, but I made sure they were always dressed very nicely. The best French clothes. I was so proud of them. Having the girls helped me a lot.”
Hjördis’s condition only got worse. But with two daughters, Niven saw “no way out” of the marriage unless she solved all their problems by dying. “I was convinced that she would kill herself and then I wouldn’t have to divorce her,” he said. “Isn’t that terrible to think that? But you do think terrible things when life is so bad.”
The success of his memoirs, The Moon’s a Balloon – which stayed at No 1 in the bestseller list for weeks after it was published in 1971 – made him richer than he had ever been. By then Hjördis was a wreck.
Niven rented a flat in London for his numerous love affairs, but by the mid1970s I noticed a loss of the old Niven sparkle. Part of it was his age – he was in his sixties – but much of it was Hjördis.
Life had become so intolerable that he considered killing her. He told me: “I came home one night and found her drunk in the bath, unable to get out. I thought she would drown. I thought about pushing her down. Oh God, I wanted her to die.”
“Are you glad you didn’t do it?” I asked.
“Oh God, yes! How could I live with that?”
He finally made up his mind to leave her. “There was someone I thought I could be happy with.” He decided to tell her after finishing his next film, Death on the Nile. But while he was in Egypt, Kristina, 16, drove her boyfriend’s BMW along an icy Swiss road and crashed into a tree. Suffering a smashed skull, a broken leg and a punctured lung, she was in a coma for eight days.
Niven rushed to Kristina’s bedside and returned to Egypt a broken man. Leaving Hjördis was now out of the question: he couldn’t break up the family.
Ustinov, Niven’s fellow star in Death on the Nile, said: “He was suddenly very frail . . . I’d never seen him like that. He always looked so healthy and strong, even as he got older. But Kristina’s dreadful accident made him age 10 years.”
Over dinner with him in London, I saw he was no longer the self-assured actor full of bonhomie I had known. His hands shook a little and he looked physically diminished. He was devoted to Kristina, who underwent 22 operations over the next few years to reconstruct her face.
It was in 1979, approaching his 70th birthday, that he first complained of getting continual cramps in his right calf. Some months later, on a trip to New York, he was struck by a terrible pain in his leg as he walked along Fifth Avenue. He underwent various tests in London but nothing wrong was found.
In January 1981, speaking at a film awards ceremony, he couldn’t understand why his speech was slurred. Watching him soon afterwards on the Michael Parkinson show, his son Jamie became so concerned that he persuaded him to have a thorough medical examination at the Mayo clinic in Minnesota.
David told me the grim news. He had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. “It’s going to kill me, Mike,” he said. His voice was quavering as well as slurred.
He was determined to die on his own terms. “I don’t want to die in agony and without dignity,” he told me. “I’m doing everything I can to beat this thing, but none of it is working.
I can’t save my own life, but I can take it. And I think I will.”
He told me his plan. “I have a doctor in Switzerland who will give me an injection that will put me gently to sleep. So when I know that I can’t stand any more, when life becomes too unbearable, I’ll exit this world under my own steam. I want control over my life and death. I don’t want this bloody disease to take me. I want it to be my decision.”
In the event, that’s not how it happened. Hjördis was incapable of looking after him, but a devout Irish nurse, Katherine Mathewson, cared for him. He wrote to me from Switzerland, saying: “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.”
He kept another shock until last: he told me he had written a letter to Hjördis saying he wanted a divorce and was taking the girls away with him. He told her how much he loved her and would to the day he died. But he never gave her the letter because he realised divorce now 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 divorcé.
When I asked Hjördis if she had known of the letter, she said: “I had no idea. Oh my God!” She was stunned and ashamed. She added another twist to the drama, claiming that David had asked her to commit suicide with him by drowning themselves in their swimming pool.
David died on July 29, 1983. Sheridan Morley, his biographer, understood that he deliberately removed his oxygen mask and quickly slipped away.
Hjördis arrived drunk at his funeral, hanging on the arm of Prince Rainier, who had persuaded her she must go. Within a year, however, she took everyone by surprise when she was persuaded by her doctor friend/lover to check into a French clinic where she was treated for her alcoholism and underwent therapy.
She was sober, coherent, confident and very personable when she talked to me in 1986 about the marriage. But within a few years she slipped back irrevocably into alcoholism.
Hjördis died from a stroke on Christmas Eve, 1997. She was 78. At her own request, she was not buried next to David.
© Michael Munn 2009
Extracted from David Niven: The Man Behind the Balloon by Michael Munn, to be published by JR Books on June 15 at £17.99.
Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times Booksfirst on 0845 271 2135
