My dear friend David’s wife was a total horror
MY DEAR friend David Niven was such a womaniser in his youth that I once played a trick on him, turning up at his house unannounced with my wife Luisa in disguise as a ‘girlfriend’ in a blonde wig.
Niv took one look at her and turned on his heel. He recognised the face, but couldn’t place her, so assumed that she was one of his many half-forgotten flings.
It’s no secret that he and his Swedish wife Hjordis didn’t get on in later life. In fact, she was a bitch to him. I say that with all the conviction it deserves.
David was a dear man who did all he could to please her, and she showed him nothing but disdain.
When he became ill with motor neurone disease in the late Seventies, she seemed to resent his friends and the affection they held for him.
I visited him at his house in the South of France two weeks before he died. The disease had reached his vocal cords and he could only speak very hesitantly. He tried to take exercise, swimming with the aid of an inflatable ring, and the help of his attentive nurse.
As I chatted to him, Hjordis came in. His voice weak, Niv said: ‘I swam two lengths.’
In an ice-hard voice she said: ‘Aren’t we a clever boy?’
When Niv died, he was at his home near Gstaad. Hjordis was not at his side. Unable to bear the thought of my friend’s body lying there alone, I drove the route in record time, just under five hours, and set about making arrangements.
Already the photographers had begun to gather. To save Hjordis the embarrassment of the lenses when she turned up, I arranged for the chauffeured car to bring her to the garage round the back of the house.
But she insisted on making an entrance at the front door, stumbling out of the car with an empty vodka bottle rolling around at her feet.
She took one look at me and snarled: ‘Here for the Press, are you?’
David’s body lies in the Swiss churchyard at Chateau d’Oex, not far from Gstaad. I have sometimes driven past, but have never been able to bring myself to stop. His death had too much of an effect on me.