Free David Niven by Michael Munn Page B

realised he was outwearing his welcome, so he looked for somewhere else to live. He told me, ‘I thought I’d try my luck at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. It turned out to be half empty, so I thought I’d see if I could persuade the manager, a nice chap called Alvin C. Weingand who later became a Congressman, if he would let me have a room for $65 a month and defer all my rent until I got a job. Of course, I told him I was expecting to get work any day, and he agreed.’
    David often played cards with Alvin Weingand who knew just about everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, and so through him and Loretta as well as Sally Blane, he soon got to know a number of important actors in Hollywood. He also became reacquainted with Douglas Fairbanks and often played tennis and golf with him.
    David admitted to me, ‘I thought these people, when they became my friends, would easily get me into the movies. There was Charlie Chaplin and Ronnie Colman, all eager to give me advice, but none of them offered me any help, and I can see why. I had no background in the theatre which they all had. They had worked hard to get where they were and I was trying to just jump in and hope to land on my feet.’
    Laurence Olivier, another British actor arriving in Hollywood at that time to make his first Shakespeare film,
As You Like It
, saw through Niven straight away. ‘He was always trying to be
liked
. Well, I understand that. So did I. So does every actor. But he was an
expert
at it because he entertained people with silly stories that had people in stitches. But that was going to wear thin eventually.’
    Deciding he might find his way into movies by becoming an extra, David tried to sign on at the Central Casting Office but was turned away because he didn’t have a work permit.
    He had once met the sister of Fred Astaire, Adèle, in London, so he took a chance and called at Astaire’s home after playing tennis nearby.
    â€˜Fred and [his wife] Phyllis were probably my dearest friends when I first got to Hollywood,’ David said. ‘But I failed to make a good first impression when I turned up at their house without my shirt on and all hot and sweaty from a game of tennis. Phyllis answered the door and I started to explain that I knew Fred’s sister, and she just shut the door and I heard her cry, “Fred, there’s a dreadful man at the door with no shirt on who says he knows your sister.”
    â€˜Fred came to the door, invited me in, we had a few drinks and chatted, Phyllis changed her mind about me and I stayed all day. We always remained especially close.’
    David admitted to me, ‘I made as many contacts as I could because I’dlearned years before that it’s not what you know but who you know, and I needed to know as many people as possible in Hollywood. So I ingratiated myself. I played cricket every Sunday with the British contingent and that way I got to know some marvellous character actors like Cedric Hardwicke and C. Aubrey Smith, and they had as many good stories to tell as I did, but because I was young they indulged me. I was just a kid to them, and they took a liking to me.’
    He also made sure he got to know, and be liked by, stars like Cary Grant and Henry Fonda. He also played golf with Jean Harlow and her fiancé William Powell. ‘It was important to let them win,’ he told me.
    Despite all these Hollywood stars who liked him, few of them were actively helping him break into movies. His break came through a series of events started, not by anyone in Hollywood, but an old Naval friend of David’s.
    It began on a weekend he spent in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, with a girl he had met in New York, Lydia Macy. From the window of the cheap room in the hotel where they were staying, David saw a sight that took his breath away. He recalled,
    In the bay was HMS
Norfolk
, a battleship which had been in Malta, and I wanted to pay