Here is an article from the Sunday Times from 1995 - indicating that Rivvy did suffer from Huntington's. It's rather long I'm afraid. . . and not too balanced either - I don't think you could say for instance that Nico was "nursing feelings of bitterness". And it is very sad.
Sunday Times
January 1, 1995, Sunday
SECTION: Features
LENGTH: 2137 words
HEADLINE: Curse of Peter Pan
BYLINE: Andrew Malone
BODY:
The elderly man drinking in the Royal Court hotel could no longer cope with
life as Peter Pan. He ordered a last gin and tonic before saying goodnight
to the doorman and heading out into the early evening bustle of London's
fashionable Sloane Square. He walked to the nearby Underground station and
waited for the first Tube train to approach.
Then, without uttering a sound, he threw himself under the advancing wheels.
Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for JM Barrie's classic about the boy
who never grew up, died instantly as onlookers screamed in horror.
The suicide on April 5, 1960, which the coroner ruled was the result of a
disturbed mind, made headlines around the world. Davies who, along with his
brothers, had been ''bought'' by Barrie 50 years earlier after the writer
saw them playing in a London park, had made a desperate last effort to
escape the torment that had stalked him since being immortalised in the play
that culled a fictional classic from his childhood fantasies. Davies, by
then aged 60, left no note to explain why he took his life. Some 34 years
later, his son, the sole survivor of the Peter Pan lineage, sat in a chair
in a Norwich nursing home last week and explained for the first time how the
curse of JM Barrie had blighted three generations of his family.
Ruthven ''Rivvy'' Davies, aged 61, is battling against the wasting effect of
Huntingdon's disease and is anxious to record the story of his troubled life
while he still has time. Once a high-profile figure on the London society
circuit, he now has few people left with whom to reminisce.
Not that he has warm, bedtime tales to tell. There was no happy ending for
his Wendy-like mother: she died soon after his father's suicide. And her
lost boys? Sadly, they remain lost. Rivvy's younger brother Peter, tormented
by fears that he too might inherit the degenerative brain disease carried by
their mother, died in his forties. The other brother, George, was last
reported to be wandering round South America; nobody has heard anything from
him for years.
Last week Rivvy recalled how Barrie, a melancholy Scotsman, used to come to
his father's London home in the 1930s and try to amuse the children. ''He
used to throw coins with stamps on them up at the ceiling. The stamps used
to stick there,'' said Rivvy, struggling to form the words because of his
illness. He laughed at the memory, until recollections of despair crowded
thoughts of amusement from his head.
THE DESPAIR he can still not escape grew from its source more than 90 years
ago, before he was born. In 1884 Jimmy Barrie, a young playwright, moved to
London in search of literary success. Each day he would wander through
Kensington Gardens as he struggled for inspiration. Arthur and Sylvia
Llewellyn Davies, a middle-class couple, who were Rivvy's grandparents,
first encountered him by chance as they took their five young boys,
including Peter, for walks in the park.
Barrie, who had led a solitary childhood, became infatuated with the Davies
children. He started writing to Sylvia, asking to come and visit. She
eventually agreed, feeling unthreatened by Barrie's peculiarly sad and
lonely demeanour. Arthur, a struggling barrister, was not so pleased by
Barrie's interest in his family, but relented after the boys told him how
happy they were when he came to play.
They were taken for pirate games and fishing trips by ''Uncle James'', who
revelled in the imaginary games of childhood. Barrie's interest was not
solely altruistic, however. As he played with the children, he began writing
the story that was to make him a multi-millionaire and destroy the lives of
those he drew on for his creative needs.
Published in 1904, Peter Pan was hailed by the critics as a masterpiece; it
is still regarded as such today, adored by generations of children and
adults.
Offstage, however, away from the glamour of first-night openings, the fairy
tale turned sour. Arthur developed a tumour soon after the play opened; it
ate away his jaw and he died in 1907. He had left little money for Sylvia to
raise the five boys. Barrie, who did not have children, saw his chance to
''buy'' his own family.
Initially, Sylvia refused his offers of help, but circumstances were hard.
Barrie, who made Pounds 44,000 in 1906 alone and was a multi-millionaire by
present-day standards, tantalised her with gifts. She relented, allowing
Barrie to become, in effect, a surrogate father to the boys. Then, just
three years after her husband died, she also became ill, dying soon
afterwards.
Barrie became guardian to the five boys, sending them to Eton and giving
them a life of hitherto unimaginable privilege. Barrie was a national hero,
guaranteed his place in literary history, and he had his own happy family;
everything was perfect.
Then ''his boys'' started to die. George, the eldest, was killed in the
first world war. Michael, aged 21, was found drowned in the river Thames.
His hands were bound to those of another man in a homosexual suicide pact.
The survivors Peter, Jack and Nicholas began to nurse feelings of
bitterness, saying privately that Barrie was trying to dominate their lives.
The public, thrilled by tales of Peter Pan, Captain Hook and Tinkerbell, had
no inkling of the feuding and deaths as Barrie used influential contacts in
the press to suppress any rumours about his surrogate family life. He had
been knighted and the press was more respectful and hypocritical then,
refusing to puncture the myth surrounding one of the leading writers in the
land.
Rivvy, though, who was born in 1933, soon became aware of deepening
hostilities between Peter, his father, and Barrie. His life, like his
father's and his uncles', was also set to become blighted by the
circumstances of his birth.
''My childhood was unhappy because of what was happening to my father. I
could see that he (Barrie) was ruining everything. From the moment that I
was old enough I was aware that my father had been exploited by Barrie and
was very bitter. My first memory of my father was with a gin bottle tipped
up at his mouth.''
On the surface, things looked happy enough. Until matters began to
disintegrate, they led a life beyond the dreams of most Britons in the
1930s. As working-class people struggled to feed themselves during the
depression, the Davies family, often accompanied by Barrie, travelled
extensively throughout Europe, a leisure activity available only to the very
wealthy and well-connected.
They holidayed at the Ritz in Madrid and Paris, and made arrangements most
years to teach the boys something about history. They visited Roman
amphitheatres and ancient monuments throughout Greece. The Davies family
album, treasured by Rivvy, gives the impression of a wealthy family at one
with their opulent lifestyle, taking leisurely picnics and laughing for the
camera.
His father's drinking started when Barrie died in 1937, leaving a legacy as
enduring as anything he had written for publication. The legacy proved to be
hatred for the family who gave him everything.
He cut Peter Davies out of his will shortly before he died, preferring to
leave the bulk of his fortune to Cynthia Asquith, his mistress and
daughter-in-law of the former prime minister. It proved to be the beginning
of the end for Peter.
''One of the biggest disappointments to my father was that he hoped to
inherit Barrie's money, but at the last minute Barrie change his will,''
Rivvy said last week. ''That was a great disappointment to my father. Our
lifestyle was reasonable until then. My father had very mixed feelings about
the whole business of Peter Pan, but he accepted that Barrie considered that
he, Peter, was the inspiration for Peter Pan and therefore it was only
reasonable that my father should inherit everything from Barrie on that
basis.
''That was my father's expectation. He felt very strongly about that. It
would have recompensed him for the notoriety he had experienced since being
linked with Peter Pan, something which he hated. The public knew he was the
origin for Peter Pan. My father felt that he could not go out because of
this. It went on from when he was a child right through to adulthood.''
Was he right in this belief? The origins of Barrie's inspiration for Peter
Pan have been disputed by critics. All are agreed that his source was the
Davies family, using his playing sessions with the five boys to create an
amalgamated character. Andrew Birkin, in his book JM Barrie and The Lost
Boys, quotes Barrie as saying that he had not focused on the characteristics
of any one boy: ''I made Peter by rubbing the five of you (the boys)
together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the
spark I got from you.''
On Peter Davies's death, however, newspapers were quick to seize on his
Christian name to claim that he was the main inspiration for Peter Pan.
Certainly Peter had no doubt that he was the one and that Barrie owed him a
big debt. The author, he argued, would have been unable to create his Peter
Pan story if it had not been for him. The belief became an obsession: Barrie
must pay, he convinced himself, for all the embarrassment he had suffered in
a childhood and in adult life perpetually linked to the boastful little boy
who never grew up.
When he discovered that he was not even going to receive money for all this
trouble, his anger was unstoppable. ''My father didn't really like Barrie.
He resented the fact that he wasn't well off and that Barrie had to support
him. But, when he was cut out of the will, he was absolutely livid and
tremendously disappointed.
''That anger was with him for the rest of his life. He started drinking
heavily. He was virtually a down-and-out by the time he died. I think the
final thing that drove him to suicide was that he had drunk all his money.
His life had been ruined.''
RIVVY and his two brothers did not escape lightly, either. After watching
their father slide into the bottle and out of reality, Rivvy then learned
that his mother was a carrier for Huntingdon's disease, a hereditary illness
that attacks the brain and leads to problems co-ordinating movement and
speech. They knew that each of them had a 50-50 chance of contracting the
illness.
George and Peter, Rivvy's brothers, left Britain for New York after their
parents died. Rivvy joined them but later returned to Britain to make his
fortune. He helped create Arlington Securities, a property investment firm,
and became rich as the business grew.
The eldest son of Peter Pan, though, had difficulty growing up: he spent
much of his time drinking and living extravagantly. With every reason to
fear that fate held a terrible future for him and his brothers, he lived
fast because he thought he might die young. As a boy, Rivvy had heard his
father talk about how his own parents and four brothers had fallen victim to
the extraordinary sequence of death and misfortune after Barrie came into
their lives.
All three brothers, like their father, became heavy drinkers. George
travelled extensively in South America; Peter came back to Britain and died
five years ago, aged 47; Rivvy, the only one to marry, took early retirement
in 1978 after his wife became ill with multiple sclerosis. He and Polly, who
is still alive, separated four years ago. Rivvy, meantime, lost all his
money, giving two women friends access to his bank accounts. He was declared
bankrupt earlier this year just as the symptoms of Huntingdon's disease
began to worsen.
Last week, as he spoke for the first time about the astonishing family saga
linked to the creation of Peter Pan, he could not find the words to describe
how he felt about one of Barrie's most famous phrases: ''To die would be an
awfully big adventure.''
Despite bouts of forgetfulness brought on by his illness, Rivvy is still a
highly-intelligent man, though he has aged beyond his 61 years. As he spoke
in a sitting room in a Norwich nursing home, he gave his verdict on the
Barrie affair: ''It's a remarkable business, really, the whole thing,'' he
said, still apparently mystified by the destiny determined by his father's
chance meeting with the playwright in a Kensington garden.
He talked about the good life, the society friends he had known and how much
he missed it all. He used the phrase ''when I was your age'' repeatedly,
asking about Christmas parties in London and debauchery in general. He
smiled sadly as tales of seasonal celebrations unfolded on the steps as
darkness fell.
Then he said goodbye and shuffled inside, where the nurses were waiting for
him the last of the boys who were never supposed to grow old, never able to
lose the Peter Pan shadow that he still believes blighted his life. Truly
Never Never Land.
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