Namedropping with Niven

When I worked the airport beat (this was London Airport, before it was known as Heathrow) the two people I saw and interviewed most frequently, by a long chalk, were David Niven and Sophia Loren, each passing through at least once a week to Geneva and Rome respectively. And of the two of them, I saw much more of Niven.
Airports are boring, soulless places. Holidaymakers may find a bit of excitement in anticipating their annual ten days on the Costas, but frequent travellers – and those poor benighted sods who work in these mini-townships – find none. For the airport’s ‘resident press’ corps of about a dozen hacks and snappers, there’s the additional frustration that everybody is going somewhere, and you are stuck there.
So Niven always lighted up my life. He’d check in and then, if I hadn’t been waiting for him, come and seek me out. During the long waits in the departure lounge he would regale me with stories about his life, his co-stars and about Hollywood. Years later, I discovered that he had been rehearsing the tales that were to form his best-seller, The Moon’s A Balloon, and create for him a reputation as one of the funniest and most engaging and entertaining chat-show guests of all time. He needed to talk and I was always delighted to listen; in that way we were the perfect couple.
He always came through Arrivals without luggage. Somehow – and I never figured out how – he managed to get somebody to collect his luggage and take it out to the waiting chauffeur. He still had to wait, like everybody else, but while waiting for it we could at least get a drink.
He spotted me wading through the dense Easter Saturday crowd to meet him as he emerged baggage-free from Arrivals, spotted my face above the travellers, waved a walking stick in the air, and shouted, across maybe 50 yards: ‘There you are, dear boy! Tell you what, come and have a pee with me… Got to have a piss, otherwise I’ll flood the fucking concourse!’
The thing was that, with his exceptional accent, it didn’t sound like swearing. So people said, ‘Ooh, look, that’s David Niven’, rather than ‘Ooh, did you hear what he just said?’ He had hurt his leg during filming, when thrown from a horse. Explaining the stick, he told me, in a voice that could be heard by maybe a hundred people: ‘An aircraft flew so low over us, it virtually passed between the horse’s fucking ears.’
He was due later that day to return as a celebrity guest at the Open Day of his old school, Stowe, and introduce a special screening of Guns of Navarone. I remember wondering in what terms he would explain the stick to the parents and boys.
Niven always expressed an interest in who else was travelling and to where, and one evening I passed my notebook across the table to show him a fairly impressive list of that day’s eminent arrivals and departures. I also told him that the list formed most of the text of my weekly letters home to my childhood sweetheart – people still wrote letters in those days – but said I was a bit embarrassed about having become such a blatant name-dropper.
‘As I said to David Niven today,’ I joked, ‘I really must stop name dropping!’
‘Don’t worry on that score,’ he assured me. ‘When you have just had tea with Sophia Loren [as he knew I had, that afternoon] people don’t expect you to tell them about the fucking waiter.’
Late one afternoon I told him that Trevor Howard and Rod Taylor would be flying out to Nice, shortly after he had taken off for Switzerland. ‘Be a pity to miss old Trevor,’ he said. ‘And Taylor’s such a pleasant young man…’
I told him I’d been talking to Taylor who’d said he understood that Howard was a big drinker. He planned to put him to the test in Nice, ‘by showing him how Australians can drink.’
‘Really?’ said Niven. ‘Trevor is going to enjoy that!’ He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Isn’t there a later flight to Geneva tonight? Maybe I could change my booking.’ So I walked him to the BEA desk in Departures and he switched to a late night flight.
They all missed their flights that night.
I kept waking up to find bottles of light ale that had been ordered for me stacking up on the table. I gave them my best shot; however I was but a callow youth and I was playing here with world-cup standard drinkers. And they were all three on top form, drinking short after short and never faltering in their tales or reminiscences about Hollywood greats. I reckoned I could catch up on all their stories from Niven, at a later date.
In the morning I showed them where they could take a shower (Executive Club lounges hadn’t been invented), made sure they knew which flights they were supposed to be on to complete their journeys, and went home.
I awoke when it was time to return to LAP for my next shift. I tapped my jacket pocket confidently to ensure that my notebook was safe and when I reached the airport I went straight to the coffee bar in Departures (‘resident’ press could walk freely through passport control: there was no other form of security apart from an always-bored Special Branch man) and reached for the little blue book.
Sometime late during the previous overnight session I’d had the inspired idea to interview three of the world’s most experienced drinkers about their and their friends’ favourite cures for a hangover. It would make a great feature, I knew, and in my mind’s eye I could already see it in print in either the Express or the Mail.
I sipped black coffee and opened the notebook. There was page after page, headed DN, TH, RT… then HB would be Humphrey Bogart, RB Richard Burton, EF Errol Flynn...and then DN, TH, RT again as they had come up with second thoughts and suggestions. It was all written in quite beautiful, almost copperplate, Pitman’s shorthand. The trouble was that not a single line of it made any sense whatsoever.
When, eventually, Niven’s book came out I immediately bought two copies – one for me and one for my mother. She’d enjoy reading it, I reckoned, not least because she’d already have heard most of the stories in it, as related to her by me on my rare weekends spent at home in Leeds. She’d be able to tell her friends: ‘This story was in David Niven’s best-selling book, but our Revel told me about it, ages ago.’
She never got to see it. Immediately I started reading, it seemed that every time in his life Niven had used, or heard somebody else use, the word ‘fuck’ he had put it in his book.
Mum, I thought, would not have approved of the famous company I was keeping, if she knew how it talked.
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