Social Conscience
Niven presides over about five auctions each year at Sotheby’s; his primary role is winning new business. As a man who has been married to two prominent socialites—first to Fernanda Wetherill and now to Eleanor Johnson Auchincloss—and sits on the boards of MoMA and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he works his connections to procure the collections of friends and acquaintances such as Bill Blass, Katharine Hepburn and Laurance Rockefeller.

But the celebrity trove of David Niven has not been among those collections offered at auction. Niven gave most of his father’s memorabilia—including 8,000 photographs, an Academy Award, the key to the city of Rio de Janeiro and piles of letters and books written in long-hand—to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "I wanted those things preserved," he says. "But I didn’t want to deal with it."

What does rile Niven is inequality in cancer care, a cause that he supports so avidly that, in 2005, he won the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Award for Excellence in Philanthropy. "It’s absolutely pathetic that the survival rate for prostate cancer for white males in New York is something like 75 percent; that would include people who didn’t have early diagnosis," he says. "The survival rate for black men in Harlem is 16 percent. That’s 60 blocks away. The numbers are also horrible for breast cancer and ovarian cancer. It’s just brutal, and it’s not right."

He credits his early career at Lehman Brothers and Robert Lehman’s charity endeavors as the main inspiration to become a philanthropist. But Niven’s life has had its share of tragedies. He lost his mother, Primula, when he was a baby; she died after falling down steps in a freak accident during a game of hide-and-seek at Tyrone Power’s house. His father succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease.

On the upside of being David Niven’s son, he fully admits it opened career doors. But, he contends, "You get one shot, and then you’re on your own." When he graduated from Harvard in 1967, Bill Paley offered him a job at CBS, but he turned it down because Lehman Brothers offered him a higher salary. "I’d just gotten married and I had no money," he says. Later he joined financier Neil McConnell as a partner in a number of venture capital deals. He backed some lemons, such as the British fragrance brand Floris, and some winners, such as Aunt Millie’s.

His daughters, Fernanda Niven, a handbag designer and marketing executive at Vera Wang, and Eugenie Niven, an interior designer, did not always enjoy being celebrity grandchildren. "I remember one time their grandfather came to our apartment," he says. "And Fernanda went to the newsstand with him, which is exactly one half-block away, and they took about half an hour to get the papers and come back. She said, ‘I’m never walking in the street with Grandfather again . . . a lot of people stopped to shake his hand and they pinched my cheek.’ She didn’t like it at all. She was about 7."

When Niven was growing up, his father used to tell him, "Just because I get treated better at a hotel or a restaurant, doesn’t mean you will be."

"It was because he was David Niven, but if you’re Jamie Niven, you shouldn’t expect anything preferential, ever, and I think that’s a good solid lesson," he says, before bursting into a grin. "It’s not to say that I haven’t used it to my advantage. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not stupid, I just didn’t expect anything."

Photograph by Sotheby’s.

Jackie Cooperman writes on design, business, travel and arts and culture for publications including the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times and Women’s Wear Daily.