David Niven Read Free

loving one’s first home.’
    I said, ‘I thought you were born in Scotland.’
    Without missing a beat he replied, ‘Oh, you don’t want to believe all that old tosh. That’s old,
old
studio publicity. They lied through their teeth. Thought it would make my life sound more interesting. Maybe it does. I don’t know.’
    I decided not to remind him that it was he who had told me that old tosh eight years earlier. It is true, however, that his early studio publicity playedfast and loose with the facts of his life. They did with a good many film stars back in the 1930s.
    â€˜Sometimes even
I
can’t tell which is real and which is studio tosh,’ he said.
    I think there was actually some truth in what he said about him not always knowing what was completely true, but he certainly benefited from playing fast and loose with the facts, making a fortune from writing the most entertaining autobiography ever penned by a Hollywood film star. David’s greatest talent was telling a good story and not letting facts get in the way, so he had often talked happily of his Scottish ancestry. The truth was, his father was born in London, and his mother, who was half-French, in Wales.
    He was born 1 March 1910 in Belgrave Mansions, in Grosvenor Gardens just around the corner from Victoria station. It’s an area of London where many film and TV stars have lived, and over the years I’ve often been in the neighbourhood to visit actors either socially or to conduct interviews or discuss some other business.
    For many years his place of birth had been given as Kirriemuir in Scotland. When he died, some obituaries named Scotland as his homeland. Even
The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia
still puts Kirriemuir as his birthplace.
    I think it was Sheridan Morley who first revealed publicly that David was born in London when he wrote his excellent biography of Niven,
The Other Side of the Moon
, in 1985, but by then I already knew that. Sheridan told me once, ‘I think David came to believe many of the fictions that either he or the studio came up with. He acted as though he wasn’t sure where he was born, but I think he chose to gloss over that subject.’
    When I asked David how his father died, he said, ‘There was a battle with the Turks. My father was a second lieutenant in the Berkshire Yeomanry which went ashore at Sulva Bay in Turkey. The Turks had laid barbed wire in the sea, and there was machine gun fire as they tried to get ashore. Most of them were killed. My father’s body was never found.’
    He said that he heard the news of his father’s death when his family was living at his father’s house, Carswell Manor, in Berkshire. ‘He was a landowner, you see,’ David said. ‘Before that we lived in Scotland – after I was born.’ They did actually live in Scotland. ‘We had all the trimmings; a butler, footmen, gamekeepers, maids. My father was rich when I was born, but he lost a good deal of his money backing the wrong horses. He had his own bookmaker too. So some of the land had to go. But he kept Carswell Manor. That’s where I was, with my sister Grizel, when we heard the news our father had been killed.’
    David’s account can’t be true because William Niven sold Carswell Manor in 1910 to help pay off debts he had run up. The family moved to a farm in Cirencester and then to Fairford Park in Gloucestershire by the time war broke out in 1914, and it was most likely there that David lived when the news came.
    It doesn’t really matter where David was when he heard of his father’s death, and I don’t think Niven was purposely lying. He was, after all, only five when the news came, and the family moved about a lot.
    When I asked him if he could remember how he felt upon hearing of his father’s death, he said, ‘I don’t think it made too much of an impression on me. I hadn’t seen