Screenland (Nov 1944-Oct 1945)

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One of David's friends to whom he had written about his marriage was Leslie Howard and when Leslie came to see David, he brought an interesting offer as well as a silver cigarette-box wedding gift. He was going to make the film of "'Spitfire" in which he played R. J. Mitchell, who designed the famous fighter aircraft, and there was a part of a test pilot for which David was ideally suited. Because this picture reflected the prestige of the Royal Air Force, the authorities granted David leave to act in "Spitfire" but when his scenes were finished he returned to "his unit again. He had several offers to star in important future movies but he refused them all, preferring to add his effort to the national service at the critical time when Britain still stood alone against the Nazi terror. So back he went to the gun battery on the coastline. For his home, David rented an oldfashioned little country cottage, with simply furnbhed white-walled rooms and bright chintzes and leaded casement windows and a rambling tree-shaded garden. Primula resigned from the W.A.A.F. and retired to the cottage for the happiest reason. David, Junior, joined the family circle there in due course, promptly nicknamed "The Egg" by his father and visited and admired by almost every famous screen star in England. Indeed when he was christened at a big London church, it became a more important social occasion than a premiere, with Noel Coward as chief godfather and Vivien Leigh and Diana Wynyard heading the godmothers. Valerie Hobson held the baby's shawl while Clive Brook and Robert Newton showed the guests into their places. Lovely, laughing Primula had entered into her husband's circle of fame so charmingly his friends and fellow actors all gladly came to greet her with her little son. And copy of the film scenes shot outside the church was sent to Sam Goldwyn, who showed it to some of David's erstwhile movie colleagues at his own home. Some months afterwards, David was sitting in the mess at the end of a long day's duty when he was suddenly summoned to the general's office. There he was offered another film role, one which the War Office particularly wanted him to accept and which indeed stirred his own blood immediately because the screenplay concerned was devoted to showing the British soldier as he really is — and David had learned to be appreciative and enthusiastic about his men while he shared the arduous training schemes and the grim hours of raids and gunnery with them. So after two years of absence, David returned to the studio once again, more contentedly this time as he watched the American troops so steadily entering Britain. With Diana Wynyard's director SCREENLAND husband, Carol Reed, David worked on the scenario and the technical details and then played the star part of Jim Perry, the young Englishman who becomes a soldier and gradually evolves from an awkward shambling recruit into the tough finished product who goes to fight in North Africa and Italy. He belongs to "The Duke of Glendon's Light Infantry," actually fashioned upon a real British regiment with battle honors as long as a bugle call. It was David's own idea to call the film "The Way Ahead," explaining that after Dunkirk days when Britain entered a long dark tunnel of tribulation, she was now emerging into sufficient light again to see her future of victory and peace with her Allies stretching ahead. Penelope Ward plays Mrs. Perry and some of our finest character actors have the parts of the soldiers, but actually the great supporting interest is provided by the Allied Army itself. The unit went on location in the African desert and in Sicily and Naples, filming under fire and with bombs dropping beside their foxholes. Quite a number or U. S. troops appear in the battle scenes too, more than one man afterwards getting David's autograph to send to the girl back home. Primula Niven attended the brilliant gala premiere at London's fashionable Odeon Theater in Leicester Square, along with American and British generals and the Duke of Gloucester. David wasn't there because he had no means of coming home from the war front — having completed the last scenes of his film in Italy, he simply remained there and joined up with the troops for active duty again. He won't consider another film until 1945 and by then he is hoping he will be able to fold his uniform away, put on his favorite tweeds again and take his wife and son back to Hollywood, which he regards as his home and where his contract still holds good for him in a drawer of Sam Goldwyn 's desk. Meanwhile he is wondering how America will like him in his soldier role. If any of his fans should disapprove, they are warmly invited to write and tell him so because David sincerely reads every scrap of his mail and keeps the rudest specimens in a special book he gaily calls "My Stinker Album." Not just the critical notes but letters and press clippings so scornful they "absolutely smell aloud" as David expresses it. With that sense of well-balanced humor that will always keep him from getting smugly careless on the screen, David shows his album to all his friends and reads it regularly "to keep my head in decent unswollen proportions and my smile from getting too superior." His favorite razz to date is still the notice from a New York newspaper discussing "Dodsworth" which says: "We have seen this latest English discovery of Goldwyn's. We can now state it is tall, dark and not the least bit handsome, neither can it act." Though it is pretty Primula who will be opening her husband's fan mail and pasting up his albums for some time yet. Like the man he portrays in the film. David Niven still has a job to finish and he means to stay at his post with his comrades of the Allied Armies until the day of final victory dawns.