"This is pretty close to my dream auction," says Niven, 61, who spent much of his youth at the Riviera estate of his father, the late actor David Niven, where prince Rainier and princess Grace were frequent visitors. "She took me under her wing when we lived in France, and I admired her greatly," he says.

He won’t mind if he overhears anyone at the auction whispering, "That’s David Niven’s son," but there was a time, particularly in the years following his father’s death in 1983, when he began to think enough was enough. After all, he had already purchased and sold a business, Aunt Millie’s Spaghetti Sauce, for a reported $17 million. "I was a pretty successful guy. I had a gigantic house in Southampton and all these dreaded possessions, and it started to get to me a little bit," he recalls. "But then, about five years ago, it stopped getting to me."

One of the reasons it has ceased to annoy him, he concedes, is that the current generation of young adults have no idea who David Niven was. "One of the young girls who came to work [at Sotheby’s] asked me, ‘Was your dad an important actor or a not-so-important actor?’" he says.

"It’s the scariest auction anyone can do. You’re on stage with Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal or Jon Stewart."

Niven stands a bulky 6 feet, 4 inches—other than the hooded eyes, he displays little physical resemblance to his father. At the podium, though, he is a showman in full command. But he didn’t start out that way when he began his career as an auctioneer 11 years ago.

He says the urge to try a new profession hit after Global Natural Resources, an oil and gas production company he had chaired, was sold in 1995 and he found himself without a job. "I always try to reinvent myself every 10 years," he says. "I got a call about doing business development for Sotheby’s, dealing with bankers and all the people I’d worked with over the years." A longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Niven says he has always had a "dramatic" interest in art that started with his father’s collection of Ernst, Kandinsky and Chagall. Still, it is one thing to be an executive at Sotheby’s and quite another to be an auctioneer there, and Niven had to endure a strong dose of humiliation along the way.

Dede Brooks, CEO of Sotheby’s at the time, was less than receptive when Niven told her he would like to become an auctioneer. "I said, ‘I’ve had some success at charity auctions.’ She said, ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re too old and you shouldn’t be thinking about this.’ But I wanted to try anyway, so I started in arcade sales." Niven recalls the reaction of an old friend who attended one of his early attempts at auctioneering. "She said, ‘I suffered, like you suffered, through 20 lots, until they took you off. You were just horrible.’ I didn’t get much better for quite a while."

Niven reached a turning point on a night in 1997 when, faced with a heckler, he managed to win the crowd. It was an auction of what he calls 20 "really bad" contemporary works of art to benefit the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in Philadelphia. "In the middle of the sale, this guy gets up—he must have been 300 pounds—and says to me, ‘You’re the cutest little auctioneer I’ve ever seen, and I want to give you a kiss,’" Niven remembers. "There’s dead silence in the room. It’s a defining moment: whether you’re going to control it or lose it. I said, ‘If you don’t sit down, the next rather unattractive work that comes out, I’m going to sell to you.’ Everyone cheered, and after that I had confidence."

In fact, he developed such a talent that for the past eight years he has been the auctioneer for the lucrative high-end charity auction, the annual Robin Hood event in New York, which raised $71 million in May. "It’s the scariest auction anyone can do. You’re in the middle of 4,400 people at the Javits Center, and you’re on stage with Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal or Jon Stewart," Niven says. "You’ve got the distraction of the star, you’re trying to control what’s going on, the prices are enormous and the tension is ferocious. All the while you’ve got to make it look seamless. The first time I did it, I sweated through my shirt and a bit of my suit I was so frightened."

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.